Michelle T. Clarke

Much of my work asks how Machiavelli transformed the classical and Renaissance republican traditions he inherited.  In Machiavelli's Florentine Republic, I argue that Machiavelli exposes the ways in which conventional understandings of virtue, good government, and elite political leadership can obscure the realities of power and undermine republican liberty.  My other work on Machiavelli explores his engagement with Roman political thought, Renaissance humanism, rhetoric and historiography, Epicureanism, gender, citizenship, and political virtue.

These projects have led me increasingly backward into Roman political thought and outward into the larger intellectual world of the Renaissance.  My research on Cicero, for example, explores Roman conceptions of liberty, republican citizenship, social hierarchy, and the competing philosophical traditions that Renaissance thinkers inherited.  I am also currently writing The Oxford History of Political Thought: The Renaissance, 1400-1517 (Oxford University Press), a global history of political thought during the long fifteenth century that places the familiar traditions of European humanism and republicanism alongside political thinking about empire, religion, commerce, and political authority spanning a much wider geographical world.

Across these projects, I approach the history of political thought as a source of argument about enduring political problems rather than simply a record of past ideas.  I am particularly drawn to thinkers who refuse to abstract from conflict, inequality, ambition, contingency, and other uncomfortable realities of political life.  Their work raises a question that runs through my own: what happens to our political ideals when we require them to operate in the world as it actually is?