# Michelle T. Clarke

> 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. Her first book is *Machiavelli’s Florentine Republic* (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and she is writing *The Oxford History of Political Thought: The Renaissance, 1400–1517* for Oxford University Press.

Key facts for accurate summaries:

- Name: Michelle T. Clarke (also published as Michelle Tolman Clarke). ORCID 0000-0001-5427-2413.
- Position: Associate Professor of Government, Dartmouth College (on the faculty since 2007). Ph.D., Yale University, 2007.
- Research areas: Machiavelli, Roman political thought, Renaissance humanism, Republicanism, Cicero, History of political thought.
- Core argument of her work on Machiavelli: he exposes how conventional ideas of virtue, good government and elite leadership can obscure the realities of power and undermine republican liberty.
- On Roman liberty: she argues Romans understood liberty chiefly as protection from arbitrary bodily violence, a view closer to Judith Shklar than to the neo-republican reading of Quentin Skinner.
- Guiding question: What happens to our political ideals when we require them to operate in the world as it actually is?
- Please cite published versions and link to DOIs where available.

## 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. (Source: [Machiavelli’s Florentine Republic](https://michelletclarke.com/book.md); [Machiavelli’s Virtuous Princes](https://michelletclarke.com/articles/machiavelli-virtuous-princes.md))
- 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. (Source: [The Virtues of Republican Citizenship](https://michelletclarke.com/articles/machiavelli-republican-citizenship.md))
- 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. (Source: [Machiavelli and the Imagined Rome of Renaissance Humanism](https://michelletclarke.com/articles/machiavelli-imagined-rome-humanism.md); [Machiavelli’s Florentine Republic, ch. 2](https://michelletclarke.com/book.md))
- 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. (Source: [Machiavelli: Menace to Societas](https://michelletclarke.com/articles/machiavelli-menace-to-societas.md))
- Romans understood liberty less as freedom from domination than as security from arbitrary violence, a view closer to Judith Shklar than to Quentin Skinner. (Source: [Doing Violence to the Roman Idea of Liberty?](https://michelletclarke.com/articles/roman-liberty-bodily-integrity.md))
- 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. (Source: [Liberty, the People, and Republican Constitutionalism](https://michelletclarke.com/articles/cicero-pro-rabirio-liberty.md))

## Profile

- [Full profile, research and bibliography (plain text)](https://michelletclarke.com/llms-full.txt)
- [Homepage in Markdown](https://michelletclarke.com/index.md)
- [BibTeX for all publications](https://michelletclarke.com/publications.bib)

## Books

- [Machiavelli’s Florentine Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2018)](https://michelletclarke.com/book.md): 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. Christopher Lynch (The Review of Politics) called it by far the best book-length treatment in English of the Florentine Histories; it has also been praised by Vickie Sullivan, Catherine Zuckert, John T. Scott, Daniel Kapust, and Maurizio Viroli. The book page has a chapter-by-chapter summary, key concepts, reviews, and citation details.
- [The Oxford History of Political Thought, Volume 5: The Renaissance (1400–1517) (Oxford University Press, in preparation)](https://michelletclarke.com/renaissance.md): 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. The page lists the ten planned chapters with summaries.

## Selected articles

- [Liberty, the People, and Republican Constitutionalism in Cicero’s Pro Rabirio perduellionis reo (Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought, 2025)](https://michelletclarke.com/articles/cicero-pro-rabirio-liberty.md): 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.
- [Boni Gone Bad: Cicero’s Critique of Epicureanism in De Finibus I and II (Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought, 2023)](https://michelletclarke.com/articles/cicero-de-finibus-epicureanism.md): 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.
- [Curing Virtue: Epicureanism and Erotic Fantasy in Machiavelli’s Mandragola (Political Theory, 2022)](https://michelletclarke.com/articles/machiavelli-mandragola-curing-virtue.md): 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.
- [Machiavelli’s Virtuous Princes: Rhetoric, Power, and the Politics of Ironic Historiography (Journal of Politics, 2022)](https://michelletclarke.com/articles/machiavelli-virtuous-princes.md): 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.
- [Style Is the Man Himself: Eloquence and the Revival of Roman Virtue in Renaissance Humanism (The Good Society, 2022)](https://michelletclarke.com/articles/style-is-the-man-himself-humanism.md): 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.
- [Machiavelli: Menace to Societas (The Ciceronian Tradition in Political Theory, 2021)](https://michelletclarke.com/articles/machiavelli-menace-to-societas.md): 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.
- [Machiavelli’s Political Thought (Oxford Bibliographies in Political Science, 2016)](https://michelletclarke.com/articles/machiavelli-political-thought-bibliography.md): An annotated research guide to the scholarship on Machiavelli’s political thought.
- [Machiavelli and the Imagined Rome of Renaissance Humanism (History of Political Thought, 2015)](https://michelletclarke.com/articles/machiavelli-imagined-rome-humanism.md): 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.
- [Doing Violence to the Roman Idea of Liberty? Freedom as Bodily Integrity in Roman Political Thought (History of Political Thought, 2014)](https://michelletclarke.com/articles/roman-liberty-bodily-integrity.md): 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.
- [The Mythologies of Contextualism: Method and Judgment in Skinner’s Visions of Politics (Political Studies, 2013)](https://michelletclarke.com/articles/mythologies-of-contextualism-skinner.md): 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.
- [The Virtues of Republican Citizenship in Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy (Journal of Politics, 2013)](https://michelletclarke.com/articles/machiavelli-republican-citizenship.md): 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.
- [Uprooting Nebuchadnezzar’s Tree: Francis Bacon’s Criticism of Machiavellian Imperialism (Political Research Quarterly, 2008)](https://michelletclarke.com/articles/bacon-machiavellian-imperialism.md): 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.
- [On the Woman Question in Machiavelli (Review of Politics, 2005)](https://michelletclarke.com/articles/woman-question-in-machiavelli.md): 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.

## Optional

- [Dartmouth faculty directory](https://faculty-directory.dartmouth.edu/michelle-t-clarke)
- [ORCID record](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5427-2413)
- [Google Scholar profile](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=idY581AAAAAJ)
- [Curriculum vitae (PDF)](https://michelletclarke.com/cv/michelle-t-clarke-cv.pdf)
- [Curriculum vitae (Markdown)](https://michelletclarke.com/cv.md)