Research

(Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, detail)

In my dissertation and first book project, I trace the origins of a key idea: that political institutions should be designed to manipulate otherwise negative human traits, or ‘vices,’ to produce positive outcomes. I show that this ‘politics of vice’ emerged as a constitutional principle long before it became a cornerstone of modern economic thought. My work reveals how the eighteenth-century triumph of the politics of vice has shaped both contemporary political institutions and the foundational assumptions of social sciences like Political Science and Political Economy.

My reconstruction first unearths the Renaissance origins of the politics of vice by tracing two intellectual traditions: Machiavellian theories of the passions (from the Florentine secretary to Spinoza) and Jansenist explorations of virtue and self-love. I then focus on late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth century Britain, showing how these arguments were developed by two seemingly disparate groups: a Harringtonian constitutional discourse (best exemplified by Trenchard and Gordon’s Cato’s Letters) and the controversial work of Bernard Mandeville. Crucially, I argue that these two strands were not rivals but operated within a shared tradition. This convergence set the stage for the 1730s and 1740s, when leading British and French thinkers—most notably Hume and Montesquieu—integrated Mandevillean assumptions into their own constitutional theories. Their approaches, however, diverged sharply: Hume focused on interest (defined as selfishness or greed), while Montesquieu proposed the utility of various vices—from interest to honor to ambition—depending on the context. This split proved foundational, driving the politics of vice into multiple directions in the latter half of the century, from the development of Scottish political economy to the American founding.

My interest in modern constitutionalism was shaped by my earlier work on its early modern antonym: absolutism. This research resulted in two articles on Jean Bodin (1530-1596) and Robert Filmer (1588-1653). In “Jean Bodin’s Demonic Constitutionalism”—co-authored with my colleague Eero Arum and published in the American Political Science Review—we demonstrate that, in Bodin’s universe, sovereigns are subject to the supernatural enforcement of natural law through demonic intervention. Far from a secularized theological concept, modern sovereignty emerges as deeply enmeshed in a theological framework.

In “Rethinking the Political Thought of Robert Filmer”—published in 2024 in History of Political Thought—I provide a new interpretation of Filmer’s infamous patriarchalism. Refuting scholars who have presented him either as an irrational extremist or as a mouthpiece for conventional commonplaces, I demonstrate that Filmer does not justify sovereignty on the basis of biological generation (as other ‘patriarchalists’ did), but rather through an original combination of divine-right and de factoism. More broadly, I present Filmer as in instance of what can be gained (in both contextual and theoretical terms) through careful conceptual reconstruction of the ideas of authors who hold positions very foreign from modern secular ones.

Clarifying the radical pre-modernity of Bodin’s and Filmer’s claims brings into even sharper relief the need to rethink the transition between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—which is precisely the focus of my two book projects.

Over the past seven years, I have also published several articles and book chapters in Italian on various aspects of sixteenth-century Florentine politics and political thought, especially the work of Niccolò Machiavelli and its modern reception, including by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

More recently, I have developed a research project on his friend Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540). I first wrote an article (now forthcoming in a special issue of History of Political Thought) that challenges canonical views of his Dialogue on the Government of Florence as the foremost elitist work of the Renaissance: by contextualizing this text in coeval Florentine debates, I argue that it is most accurately characterized as advocating popular government in Florence. I then developed the methodological implications of my interpretation in two articles on Guicciardini’s Ricordi and History of Italy, published in Rinascimento in 2024 and 2025. Focusing respectively on Guicciardini’s Ricordi and on his History of Italy, I demonstrate that Guicciardini’s political thought should be approached in a contextual way, excavating the differences between the specific positions articulated in each work at a specific moment in time. 

My second book project turns from the substantive assumptions at the heart of modern social sciences to a structural or ontological claim associated with political economy, political science, and sociology alike: that ‘society’ is a non-political realm that exists alongside and outside of the state. It has often been suggested that this concept emerged in the eighteenth century; the details of its history, however, have never been fully excavated. Questioning the use of the state-society binary itself, a recent wave of historical research has started recovering the variety of ways in which politics was conceptualized before and beyond the state during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I have myself contributed to this conversation with the article “The Politics of societas and the Early Modern State,” published in 2025 in The Historical Journal. I plan to expand this research into a monograph-length treatment of the conceptual transformations of ‘society’ in early modern Europe, culminating in Hegel’s canonical distinction of civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) from the state (Staat) in his Philosophy of Right. I envision this research as comprising three stages. The first investigates the Latin pre-history of ‘society’ in Roman law, in which societas was the technical term for the contract of partnership, and in the Ciceronian and Aristotelian traditions, which characterized (in very different ways) the civitas as a societas. The second stage will focus on the vernacular equivalents of societas, especially in English (‘society’) and French (‘société’). I plan to draw on my dissertation work on authors such as seventeenth-century French moralists, Mandeville, and Hume, as well as on a variety of more popular texts such as dictionaries, pamphlets, and literary works. Lastly, I will turn to the motivations for Hegel’s choice to distinguish civil society from both the family and the state, asking how this choice relates both to the history reconstructed in the first two parts of the book and to contemporary theoretical debates. During the last few decades, a range of voices have encouraged political science to reflect on the ‘social’ dynamics of politics, going beyond a narrow concentration on ‘the political’ as the public arena. My project aims to provide a much-needed historical perspective on these conversations, contextualizing them in a centuries-long history of reflections on what counts as ‘social’ and why.