My research concerns early modern political theory, the political thought of historians, and the historical study of law. I combine my interests in my first book, Montesquieu and the Spirit of Rome, released in 2022 at Oxford University’s Studies in the Enlightenment Series.

In the book, I argue that the eighteenth-century French author Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689-1755) developed a novel, comprehensive account of Roman history that framed his new political science and grounded his liberalism. Through Rome Montesquieu articulated the strengths and weaknesses of the liberal order—the moderation that can distinguish it and the sources of extremism that must haunt it. Rome’s legacy in early-modern thought turns on the work of Montesquieu,

The Romans, Montesquieu thought, reveal critical flaws in the modern state—its anxiety; its listlessness; the spiritual weakness it couples with endless technological power; its inequality; its tyranny; its theological excesses. And so from his first private notes to his final masterpieces, Montesquieu wrestled with Rome: when he published The Spirit of the Laws in 1748, he gave it two partners—the Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decadence and the Dialogue of Sulla and Eucrates—both emphatically Roman. Those neglected Roman works, and the Roman aspects of the Laws, guide Montesquieu’s investigations into historical esprits and natural principes—his new science of politics.

Montesquieu’s Rome, in sum, is both dangerous and useful: dangerous because it ignites human longings for a providential historical process, a purer civic equality, a virtuous, martial hierarchy, a unified, transnational law, and a single, best solution to the problem of human government; useful because, when properly studied, it moderates those same longings.

A version of my book’s first chapter, titled “Montesquieu’s Considerations on the State of Europe,” appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas . I’ve published three other articles: the first (in the American Political Science Review; co-authored with Vickie Sullivan), 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 History of European Ideas), describes how the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian jurist Gian Vincenzo Gravina tried to reconcile Hobbesian and Platonic conceptions of law; and the third (forthcoming in the History of Political Thought) investigates Montesquieu’s idea of the good life and his relationship to the Roman poet Lucretius.