Michelle T. Clarke
Associate Professor of Government
I study the history of political thought, with an emphasis on the movement of classical ideas into the modern world. My first book, Machiavelli's Florentine Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2018) examines Machiavelli's challenge to the way that earlier humanists had narrated the rise and fall of republican politics in Florence. My articles have also spanned a number of topics related to liberty, including what it means to be free, how true freedom is won and lost, and why it is always so difficult to maintain. In the course of exploring these questions, I have found myself drawn again and again to materials that reflect my own sense that political theory, done properly, refuses to abstract from the messy, inconvenient, and often distasteful realities of political life. For Machiavelli and his Roman sources, as for me, the work of political theory is to guide us through this world, mindful of the possibility that it may speak to us in a different voice than moral philosophy.
Contact
Department(s)
Government
Education
- Ph.D. Yale University
- M. Phil. Yale University
- M.A. Yale University
- B.A. Tufts University
Selected Publications
Michelle T. Clarke. Machiavelli's Florentine Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Michelle T. Clarke. "Liberty, the People, and Republican Constitutionalism in Cicero's Pro Rabirio perduellionis reo," POLIS: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought (forthcoming).
Michelle T. Clarke, "Boni Gone Bad: Cicero's Critique of Epicureanism in De Finibus I and II," POLIS: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought 40, no. 1 (2023): 25-43.
Michelle T. Clarke. "Curing Virtue: Epicureanism and Erotic Fantasy in Machiavelli's Mandragola," Political Theory 50, no. 6 (2022): 913-938.
Works In Progress
The Oxford History of Political Thought: The Renaissance, 1400-1517 (book project, under contract)