Isaac Nakhimovsky

Isaac Nakhimovsky's picture
Associate Professor
Office: 
HQ 257
Phone: 
203-432-1396
Fields of interest: 

Intellectual history of Europe since the 17th century; history of political thought; historiography of international law and political economy

Bio: 

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:

 
“A Republic of Cuckoo Clocks: Switzerland and the History of Liberty,” Modern Intellectual History 12, no. 1 (2015): pp. 219-33.
 
“The ‘Ignominious Fall of the European Commonwealth’: Gentz, Hauterive, and the Armed Neutrality of 1800,” in Trade and War: The Neutrality of Commerce in the Interstate System, ed. Koen Stapelbroek. COLLeGIUM: Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, 2011), 177-90.
 
 
 
 
   
 
Period: 
Early Modern
Modern
Geography: 
Atlantic
Eastern Europe
Global/International
Western Europe
Thematic: 
Economic
Empires & Colonialism
Historiography
Intellectual
Legal
Political