Isaac Nakhimovsky
Intellectual history of Europe since the 17th century; history of political thought; historiography of international law and political economy
Isaac Nakhimovsky is Associate Professor of History and Humanities. His first book, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte (Princeton, 2011), shows how, in the context of the French Revolution, the German philosopher J.G. Fichte came to theorize economic independence as an ideal, and developed a systematic political theory of what John Maynard Keynes later termed “national self-sufficiency.” He has also collaborated on an edition of Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation (Hackett, 2013), and two volumes of essays on eighteenth-century political thought and its post-revolutionary legacies: Commerce and Peace in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2017), and Markets, Morals, Politics: Jealousy of Trade and the History of Political Thought (Harvard, 2018). In June 2022 he delivered the Quentin Skinner Lecture at the University of Cambridge. His next book, The Holy Alliance: The Liberal Idea of a Federal Europe after 1815, is under contract for Princeton University Press.
Selected other publications:
“Georg Lukács and Revolutionary Realpolitik, 1918–19: An Essay on Ethical Action, Historical Judgment, and the History of Political Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 83, no. 1 (2022): 63-85.
