# Michelle T. Clarke

Associate Professor of Government, Department of Government, Dartmouth College
Field: Political theory; history of political thought
Website: https://michelletclarke.com/ · ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5427-2413 · Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=idY581AAAAAJ · Email: Michelle.T.Clarke@dartmouth.edu
Last updated: 2026-10-23

> Michelle T. Clarke is a political theorist and Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. She works on the history of political thought, especially Machiavelli, Roman political thought (above all Cicero), Renaissance humanism, and the foundations of modern republican ideas.

Guiding question: What happens to our political ideals when we require them to operate in the world as it actually is?

## Research

I am a political theorist specializing in the history of political thought, particularly Machiavelli, Roman political thought, Renaissance humanism, and the foundations of modern political ideas. My research examines how political thinkers inherit, reinterpret, and sometimes deliberately dismantle earlier traditions as they confront changing political realities.

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 explores Roman conceptions of liberty, republican citizenship, social hierarchy, and the competing philosophical traditions that Renaissance thinkers inherited.

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.

### Main themes

- **Machiavelli and the republican tradition**: How Machiavelli transformed the classical and Renaissance republican traditions he inherited, and how conventional ideas of virtue and elite leadership can mask power and undermine liberty.
- **Roman political thought**: Cicero and Roman ideas of liberty, citizenship, social hierarchy, and the philosophical schools (including Epicureanism) that Renaissance thinkers inherited.
- **Renaissance humanism**: Rhetoric, historiography and the humanist revival of Roman virtue, and a global history of fifteenth-century political thought.
- **Method in the history of ideas**: The limits of contextualism and the role of interpretive judgment in reading political texts.

## Key arguments

- In Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories, the language of virtue, not force, is what carried the Medici to princely power in a republic: generosity, loyalty, and good works built networks of obligation that hollowed out Florentine liberty.
- For Machiavelli, the Roman virtue of good faith (fides) was a political vice, because personal loyalty fed patronage and let elites gather power outside the law.
- Machiavelli was a sharper critic of Renaissance humanism than the Cambridge School allows: humanist portraits of Rome and Florence quietly served oligarchic rule, and he wrote against them.
- Machiavelli’s break with Cicero goes deeper than tactics: he rejects Cicero’s idea of a natural human societas and treats every state as a dominion imposed on its subjects.
- Romans understood liberty less as freedom from domination than as security from arbitrary violence, a view closer to Judith Shklar than to Quentin Skinner.
- Cicero grounds liberty in the consensus of good citizens and the self-regulation of the ruling elite more than in popular safeguards like the right of appeal.

## Books

- Clarke, Michelle T. 2018. *Machiavelli’s Florentine Republic*. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107125506. https://www.cambridge.org/9781107125506
  - Summary: Argues that Machiavelli exposes how conventional understandings of virtue, good government, and elite political leadership can obscure the realities of power and undermine republican liberty.
- *The Oxford History of Political Thought: The Renaissance, 1400–1517*. Oxford University Press. Under contract. Details: https://michelletclarke.com/renaissance.md
  - Summary: A history of political thought in the long fifteenth century, organized by theme. It sets the humanist and republican traditions of Italy and northern Europe alongside political thinking about empire, religion, commerce, and authority across a wider world, with chapters on the Ottoman Empire, the household and gender, wealth and inequality, the origins of racism, and the emerging state system.
  - Planned chapters: Introduction; New Worlds; The Politics of Virtue; People and Princes; God, the Church, and Prophetic Power; Love, Friendship, and Family; Wealth and Inequality; Reimagining the International Order; The Construction of Race; Conclusion
- *Roman Political Thought*. In progress.

## Articles and chapters

- Clarke, Michelle T. 2025. “Liberty, the People, and Republican Constitutionalism in Cicero’s Pro Rabirio perduellionis reo.” Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought 42, no. 1 (2025): 9–28. https://doi.org/10.1163/20512996-12340461
  - Summary: Reads Cicero’s 63 BCE defense of Gaius Rabirius, accused of treason for his part in killing the tribune Saturninus decades earlier, as a concentrated statement of Cicero’s idea of liberty. Cicero ties libertas less to popular safeguards like provocatio (appeal to the people) and auxilium (tribunician aid) than to the consensus of good citizens, presenting liberty as the calm security of being protected from the morally degenerate and grounding it in the self-regulation of Rome’s ruling elite.
  - Topics: Cicero, Roman liberty, Senatus consultum ultimum, Provocatio, Elite leadership, Republicanism
- Clarke, Michelle T. 2023. “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. https://doi.org/10.1163/20512996-12340389
  - Summary: Argues that Cicero’s attack on Epicureanism in De Finibus 1 and 2 is aimed at Roman aristocrats, like the dialogue’s spokesman Lucius Torquatus, who believed Epicurean ethics could coexist with traditional Roman virtue. Cicero answers that treating virtue as a means to pleasure corrupts it: Epicureanism reduces politics to utility and borrows the language of honor while emptying it, so that it lacks decorum, the virtue needed to elevate civic life, much as Stoicism lacks the moderation needed to build consensus.
  - Topics: Cicero, Epicureanism, Stoicism, Decorum, Virtue, Roman aristocracy
- Clarke, Michelle T. 2022. “Curing Virtue: Epicureanism and Erotic Fantasy in Machiavelli’s Mandragola.” Political Theory 50, no. 6 (2022): 913–938. https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221095859
  - Summary: Asks why Lucrezia, the heroine of Machiavelli’s comedy Mandragola, is called ‘fit to govern a kingdom.’ Tracing the play’s overlooked borrowings from Lucretius’s De rerum natura, which Machiavelli himself transcribed, and Ovid’s Ars amatoria, it argues that Machiavelli accepts Epicurean hedonism but sides with Ovid against Lucretius in rejecting the idea that happiness requires freedom from illusion. Virtue becomes a kind of seductive skill, and Lucrezia, who orders the competing desires of her household, models a princely art of staging and managing fantasy.
  - Topics: Machiavelli, Mandragola, Lucretius, Ovid, Epicureanism, Gender, Princely virtue
- Clarke, Michelle T. 2022. “Machiavelli’s Virtuous Princes: Rhetoric, Power, and the Politics of Ironic Historiography.” Journal of Politics 84, no. 1 (2022): 483–495. https://doi.org/10.1086/715596
  - Summary: Contrasts The Prince, where princely power rests on arms and force, with the Discourses on Livy and Florentine Histories, where princes in Rome and Florence rise through moral authority. With Cosimo de’ Medici as the central case, it shows how a reputation for generosity and good works, extended through personal rather than public channels, built networks of obligation that converted popular favor into princely rule, an art subtler than hypocrisy or heroics. Machiavelli exposes it through ironic history-writing in the tradition of Thucydides, Sallust, and Tacitus, teaching republican readers to doubt the moral language that legitimates domination.
  - Topics: Machiavelli, Cosimo de’ Medici, Power, Moral authority, Rhetoric, Irony, Historiography
- Clarke, Michelle T. 2022. “Style Is the Man Himself: Eloquence and the Revival of Roman Virtue in Renaissance Humanism.” The Good Society 31, no. 1–2 (2022): 150–157. https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/good-society/article-abstract/31/1-2/150/386690/Style-Is-the-Man-Himself-Eloquence-and-the-Revival
  - Summary: A review essay on James Hankins’s Virtue Politics (2019), which argues that Renaissance humanism was held together by the conviction that a community’s health depends on the character of its rulers. Clarke extends the argument through eloquence: Petrarch, following Cicero and Quintilian, held that good speech both reveals and shapes a well-ordered soul, which is why humanists cared so intensely about getting Latin right. Machiavelli, by contrast, strips Livy of his style in the Discourses, treating eloquence and virtue as separable.
  - Topics: Renaissance humanism, James Hankins, Petrarch, Eloquence, Cicero, Machiavelli
- Clarke, Michelle T. 2021. “Machiavelli: Menace to Societas.” In The Ciceronian Tradition in Political Theory, edited by Daniel J. Kapust and Gary Remer, 86–102. University of Wisconsin Press, 2021. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/81818
  - Summary: Asks whether Machiavelli’s famous reversals of Cicero’s On Duties in The Prince (the lion and the fox, fear over love, cruelty well used) amount to a fundamental break. Cicero, the chapter argues, keeps the honorable (honestum) authoritative but redefines it as the preservation of societas, a social order rooted in natural human sociability and good faith. Machiavelli rejects societas as unsupported by history and politically dangerous, treating every state as a dominion imposed on its subjects, so that The Prince becomes a sustained attempt to think about politics without it.
  - Topics: Machiavelli, Cicero, On Duties, The Prince, Societas, Honestum and utile, Ciceronian tradition
- Clarke, Michelle T. 2016. “Machiavelli’s Political Thought.” Oxford Bibliographies in Political Science, 2016. With Vickie B. Sullivan. http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756223/obo-9780199756223-0176.xml
  - Summary: An annotated research guide to the scholarship on Machiavelli’s political thought.
  - Topics: Machiavelli
- Clarke, Michelle T. 2015. “Machiavelli and the Imagined Rome of Renaissance Humanism.” History of Political Thought 36, no. 3 (2015): 452–470. https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/hpt/2015/00000036/00000003/art00003
  - Summary: Asks why Machiavelli opens the Discourses on Livy by presenting Rome as unexplored territory, after a century of intense humanist study. His aim was to defend Rome as it really was against the Rome imagined by Leonardo Bruni and especially Poggio Bracciolini, whose Oration on Behalf of Venice faulted the turbulent Roman republic. Machiavelli agrees that earlier humanist portraits of Rome were idealized but rejects Poggio’s critique on historical and theoretical grounds: Rome’s tumults sustained a more popular liberty, and humanist hostility to conflict reflected an oligarchic bias. The article challenges Quentin Skinner’s view of the Discourses as a continuation of humanist orthodoxy.
  - Topics: Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Poggio Bracciolini, Leonardo Bruni, Renaissance humanism, Venice, Civic conflict, Quentin Skinner
- Clarke, Michelle T. 2014. “Doing Violence to the Roman Idea of Liberty? Freedom as Bodily Integrity in Roman Political Thought.” History of Political Thought 35, no. 2 (2014): 211–233. https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/hpt/2014/00000035/00000002/art00001
  - Summary: Questions the neo-republican claim, associated with Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit, that Romans understood liberty as freedom from arbitrary power. Drawing on Roman histories and orations, it argues that libertas meant something narrower and more physical: security from unpredictable, unjustified violence, won through the collective power of the civitas and enjoyed as a legal entitlement. This idea is closer to Judith Shklar’s liberalism of fear, and through her to genuinely neo-Roman writers such as Montaigne and Montesquieu.
  - Topics: Roman liberty, Neo-republicanism, Quentin Skinner, Philip Pettit, Judith Shklar, Bodily integrity
- Clarke, Michelle T. 2013. “The Mythologies of Contextualism: Method and Judgment in Skinner’s Visions of Politics.” Political Studies 61, no. 4 (2013): 767–783. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.01000.x
  - Summary: Argues that Quentin Skinner’s contextualism does not deliver the interpretive method it promises. Skinner traces the ‘mythologies’ of textualist reading to its reliance on the interpreter’s judgment and presents contextualism as a discipline that minimizes judgment, yet judgment remains indispensable to his own practice. His added assumption that philosophers write chiefly for strategic, ideological ends produces a mythology of its own, casting philosophical authors as ideologues, though his insistence on recovering an author’s own perspective remains valuable.
  - Topics: Method, Contextualism, Quentin Skinner, Cambridge School, Interpretation, Ideology
- Clarke, Michelle T. 2013. “The Virtues of Republican Citizenship in Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy.” Journal of Politics 75, no. 2 (2013): 317–329. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022381613000030
  - Summary: Argues that Machiavelli is skeptical of the Roman social virtues, especially aspects of fides (good faith), because they bound clients to powerful patrons and let elites gather power outside the law. Rereading the classic exemplum of Manlius Torquatus, he shows how personal loyalties endanger republican liberty and sketches a model of citizenship in which ‘unsociable’ traits are central. Republicanism, on this reading, is a politics of limits, and Machiavelli attacks the culture of personal trust from within the republican tradition itself.
  - Topics: Machiavelli, Citizenship, Fides, Patronage, Manlius Torquatus, Republicanism
- Clarke, Michelle T. 2008. “Uprooting Nebuchadnezzar’s Tree: Francis Bacon’s Criticism of Machiavellian Imperialism.” Political Research Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2008): 367–378. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912908318845
  - Summary: Shows that Francis Bacon, for all his open admiration of Machiavelli, rejects Machiavelli’s model of empire. Guided by philanthropia, the relief of man’s estate, Bacon reverses three Machiavellian images (Solomon for David, the mustard seed for Nebuchadnezzar’s tree, Themistocles for Fabius Maximus) to reject violent conquest, rigid hierarchy, and conservative values in favor of an empire of humanity, prosperity, and cosmopolitanism. Philanthropia, the article argues, is what unifies Bacon’s politics and science, and it anticipates later commercial and liberal justifications of empire.
  - Topics: Francis Bacon, Machiavelli, Empire, Philanthropia, Glory
- Clarke, Michelle T. 2005. “On the Woman Question in Machiavelli.” Review of Politics 67, no. 2 (2005): 229–255. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034670500033507
  - Summary: Against the familiar charge of misogyny, notes that Machiavelli’s major works feature dozens of politically effective and sometimes admirable women, such as Caterina Sforza. To understand them, it reconstructs Machiavelli’s concept of animo, the natural spiritedness that becomes virtù when disciplined by a city’s institutions. Because women stand outside those institutions, they show what political outsiders do with unbridled animo, for better or worse, and Machiavelli’s treatment of them denaturalizes gender norms, so that his works can be read as feminist texts even though he was no feminist.
  - Topics: Machiavelli, Gender, Women, Spiritedness (animo), Political outsiders, Caterina Sforza

## Appointments

- Associate Professor of Government, Dartmouth College (2015–present)
- Assistant Professor of Government, Dartmouth College (2007–2015)

## Education

- Ph.D. with Distinction, Political Science, Yale University, 2007. Dissertation: Machiavelli’s Political Pluralism
- B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science, summa cum laude, Tufts University, 2001

## Editorial work and service

- Co-editor (with Jeffrey Church), Concepts in the History of Political Thought, book series, Oxford University Press
- Co-editor (with Daniel Kapust and John T. Scott), special issue of Polis 40, no. 1 (2023), in memory of Rex Stem
- Co-Chair, APSA Division 1: Political Thought and Philosophy (2025)
- AHPT Book Award Committee (2024–2025)
- APSA Nominating Committee (2024)

## Honors

- 2020: Apgar Award for Innovative Teaching, Dartmouth
- 2019: Senior Fellowship, Institute for Advanced Study, Central European University (declined)
- 2015: Elizabeth R. and Robert A. Jeffe 1972 Fellowship
- 2014, 2015: Walter and Constance Burke Junior Faculty Research Award
- 2013: Dartmouth Junior Faculty Fellowship

## Selected invited talks

- 2024: Inaugural Conference of the Association for the History of Political Thought, University of Texas at Austin
- 2024: Old Lessons for New Challenges: What the Past Can Teach About AI and New Media, Tocqueville Forum, University of Houston
- 2023: Keynote, The Reception of Roman Ideas and Practices, European Research Council and University of Padua
- 2023: The Sources of Machiavelli’s Thought and Works, Villa Vigoni, Menaggio
- 2023: LeFrak Forum, Michigan State University
- 2019: Harvard Early Modern Workshop and Political Theory Colloquium
- 2018: Mandragola at 500, University of Wisconsin–Madison
- 2013: Conference on the 500th Anniversary of Machiavelli’s Prince, Harvard University

## Teaching (Dartmouth College)

- Political Ideas
- Roman Political Thought
- Machiavelli and Machiavellianism
- Classical Political Realism: Power and Statecraft in the Ancient World
- Democratic Theory
- Plutarch’s Guide to Leadership
- The Political Philosophy of Nietzsche
- The Political Philosophy of J.J. Rousseau
- An Intellectual History of Racism
- The Political Theory of Game of Thrones
- Humanities I and II
- Government Honors Program

## Contact

- Email: Michelle.T.Clarke@dartmouth.edu
- Office: Silsby Hall, Room 219A, HB 6108, Hanover, NH 03755
- Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=idY581AAAAAJ
- Faculty directory: https://faculty-directory.dartmouth.edu/michelle-t-clarke
- CV (PDF): https://michelletclarke.com/cv/michelle-t-clarke-cv.pdf