Early life and education
Williams was born in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, the only son of a civil servant. He was educated at Chigwell School, and read Greats (Classics) at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1951 with the rare distinction of a congratulatory first-class honours degree, before spending his year-long national service in the Royal Air Force (RAF) flying Spitfire in Canada.
While on leave in New York, he met his future spouse, Shirley, daughter of political scientist and philosopher George Catlin and novelist Vera Brittain...who was studying at Columbia University. At the age of 22, after winning a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford in 1951, Williams returned to England with Shirley to take up the post. They were married in 1955. As Williams was later knighted and Shirley later received a life peerage, they were one of the few couples to both hold titles in their own right.
Career
Williams left Oxford to accommodate his wife's rising political ambitions, finding a post first at University College London, where he worked from 1959 until 1964, then was elected Professor of Philosophy at Bedford College, while his wife worked as a journalist for the
Financial Times. For 17 years, the couple lived in a large house in Kensington with the literary agent Hilary Rubinstein and his wife. During this time, described by Williams as one of the happiest of his life, the marriage produced a daughter, Rebecca, but the development of his wife's political career kept the couple apart, and the marked difference in their personal values...Williams was a confirmed atheist, his wife a devout Catholic...placed a strain on their relationship, which reached breaking point when Williams had an affair with Patricia Law Skinner, then wife of the historian Quentin Skinner. The marriage was dissolved in 1974, and Williams and Skinner subsequently married, a marriage that produced two sons. Shirley Williams said of their marriage:
... [T]here was something of a strain that comes from two things. One is that we were both too caught up in what we were respectively doing...we didn't spend all that much time together; the other, to be completely honest, is that I'm fairly unjudgmental and I found Bernard's capacity for pretty sharp putting-down of people he thought were stupid unacceptable. Patricia has been cleverer than me in that respect. She just rides it. He can be very painful sometimes. He can eviscerate somebody. Those who are left behind are, as it were, dead personalities. Judge not that ye be not judged. I was influenced by Christian thinking, and he would say "That's frightfully pompous and it's not really the point." So we had a certain jarring over that and over Catholicism.
Williams conceded that he could be tough. "I like to think that this is usually when I'm confronted with self-satisfaction. In philosophy the thing that irritates me is smugness, particularly scientistic smugness." He was appointed Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge in 1967, vacating the chair to serve as Provost of King's College from 1979 until 1987. He left England in 1988 to become Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, citing the relative prosperity of American academic life, and the so-called "brain drain" from England of academics moving to the U.S. He told a British newspaper at the time that he could barely afford to buy a house in central London on his salary as an academic. He told
The Guardian in November 2002 that he regretted his departure becoming so public: "I was persuaded that there was a real problem about academic conditions and that if my departure was publicized this would bring these matters to public attention. It did a bit, but it made me seem narky, and when I came back again in three years it looked rather absurd. I came back for personal reasons...it's harder to live out there with a family than I supposed."
Later in life, he held positions at Berkeley (1986—2003) where he was Mills Professor (1986—1988), Sather Classics Lecturer and Sather Professor (1988—1989), and Monroe Deutsch Professor of Philosophy (1988—2003), and also served, at the same time, as White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford (1990—1996), eventually becoming a Fellow of All Souls College again in 1997.
Royal commissions
In addition to academic life, Williams chaired and served on a number of royal commissions and government committees. In the 1970s, he chaired the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship, which reported in 1979 that: "Given the amount of explicit sexual material in circulation and the allegations often made about its effects, it is striking that one can find case after case of sex crimes and murder without any hint at all that pornography was present in the background." The Committee's report was evidently influenced by the liberal thinking of John Stuart Mill, a philosopher greatly admired by Williams, who used Mill's principle of liberty to develop what he called the "harm condition", whereby "no conduct should be suppressed by law unless it can be shown to harm someone".
Williams concluded that pornography could not be shown to be harmful and that "the role of pornography in influencing society is not very important ... to think anything else is to get the problem of pornography out of proportion with the many other problems that face our society today." The committee reported that, so long as children were protected from seeing it, adults should be free to read and watch pornography as they saw fit. Apart from pornography, he also sat on commissions examining the role of gambling, drug abuse, and private schools. "I did all the major vices", he said.
Opera
Williams was interested in opera from the age of 15, and served on the board of the English National Opera for 20 years. He wrote the entry for "opera" in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and a collection of his essays,
On Opera, was published in 2006, edited by his widow, Patricia.
Honours and death
Williams was knighted in 1999. He became a fellow of the British Academy and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters (Litt.D.) by the University of Cambridge in 2002.
He died on 10 June 2003 while on holiday in Rome. He had been suffering from multiple myeloma, a form of cancer. He was survived by his wife, Patricia, their two sons, and a daughter from his first marriage.