My research concerns early modern political theory, the political thought of historians, and the historical study of law.

I combine my interests in my dissertation, Montesquieu and the Spirit of Rome.

Three threads unite Montesquieu’s treatment of the Romans. First, the greatness of Rome, properly understood, forces us to consider the nature of political change on the grandest scale. If the Romans could remake Europe and the Mediterranean world—if they could eradicate the predominant state of that world, the republic, and the principle that animates republics, political virtue—could someone not do the same today? If the Romans drove the world into decadence, could someone not drive it back to virtue? Or else forward into some new perfection? Nietzsche asked these very questions, and he was not the only one to do so. Montesquieu, through his subtle and thorough history of Rome, attempts to temper both those who dream that the modern commercial state will bring about a paradise on earth and those who wish to overthrow it and recover a paradise past.

Second, although Rome destroyed ancient virtue, it also represents virtue’s highest achievement. In Rome Montesquieu found the greatest recorded experiment in both patriotic devotion (popular virtue) and rule by the wise (elite virtue). Montesquieu insists that one must appreciate how astonishing the Romans’ virtues were in order to understand why they should not be imitated.

Third, part of Rome’s extension of its power involved the spread of its laws. From the unity of the empire came the idea of a unified law—all peoples under a single text. And if one text could apply to all, then that text must be reason itself. In Roman law Montesquieu found both the temptation to subordinate the natural diversity and pluralism of human life to a monolithic power and the hope that reason could, through law, rule without limit. By historicizing the law in the peculiar way that he did, Montesquieu attempted to rein in the claims of law and so prevent it from becoming either tyrannical or despotic.

A version of the first chapter of my dissertation, titled “Montesquieu’s Considerations on the State of Europe,” is forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Ideas. I’ve also co-authored two other articles. The first, in the American Political Science Review, describes how Montesquieu used a despised Eastern Other (feudal Japan) to reveal the abuses of both Christianity and the Enlightenment to his European readers; the second, in the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic, discusses how Machiavelli inverted the traditional Roman virtues found in Titus Livy’s ab urbe condita.

I have two other articles currently in progress. In the first, I revive Montesquieu’s extensive critique of Cardinal Richelieu, the French absolutist par excellence, to show how absolutism and authoritarianism alike depend on an unreasonably optimistic estimation of human nature. The authoritarian, like the absolutist, is an idealist in the worst sense. Montesquieu’s arguments in this regard have acquired a new urgency in our time. The second article grows out of my interest in the history of jurisprudence. Gian Vincenzo Gravina, despite his brilliance and his considerable reputation in the 18th century, has received little attention from modern scholars. In crafting a theory of legitimacy founded on the public will (publica voluntas), Gravina wove together Hobbesian politics, Platonic philosophy, and Roman jurisprudence. Gravina’s synthesis helps us understand both the peculiar legal legacies of Hobbes and Plato and the history of popular sovereignty.

My next project will act as a counterbalance to my current one and will further my inquiries into the relationship between Roman memories and modern radicalism. In that project I will look at how two French republicans, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, used Rome to distance themselves from their present and to command republican life in the future. The book will begin with two chapters on each thinker, one on their use of Rome to critique modern society and the second on the ways they envision reviving a Roman-inspired republic in a commercial age.  The penultimate chapter will concern the influence of both Mably and Rousseau’s Rome on the French Revolution. The final chapter will discuss contemporary responses to Mably and Rousseau’s Roman critiques.