Michelle T. Clarke

|Associate Professor

Academic Appointments

Associate Professor of Government

I study the history of political thought, with an emphasis on the movement of classical ideas into the modern world. My first book, Machiavelli's Florentine Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2018) examines Machiavelli's challenge to the way that earlier humanists had narrated the rise and fall of republican politics in Florence. My articles have also spanned a number of topics related to liberty, including what it means to be free, how true freedom is won and lost, and why it is always so difficult to maintain. In the course of exploring these questions, I have found myself drawn again and again to materials that reflect my own sense that political theory, done properly, refuses to abstract from the messy, inconvenient, and often distasteful realities of political life. For Machiavelli and his Roman sources, as for me, the work of political theory is to guide us through this world, mindful of the possibility that it may speak to us in a different voice than moral philosophy.

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Contact

Michelle.T.Clarke@dartmouth.edu

Silsby, Room 205

HB 6108

Department(s)

Government

Education

Ph.D. Yale University
M. Phil. Yale University
M.A. Yale University
B.A. Tufts University

Selected Publications

Michelle T. Clarke. Machiavelli's Florentine Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Michelle T. Clarke, "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.
Michelle T. Clarke. "Curing Virtue: Epicureanism and Erotic Fantasy in Machiavelli's Mandragola," Political Theory 50, no. 6 (2022): 913-938.
Michelle T. Clarke. "Machiavelli's Virtuous Princes: Rhetoric, Power, and the Politics of Ironic Historiography." Journal of Politics 84, no. 1 (2022): 483-495.

Michelle T. Clarke. "Machiavelli: Menace to Societas" in The Ciceronian Tradition in Political Theory, ed. Daniel Kapust and Gary Remer. University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
Michelle T. Clarke. "Machiavelli's Political Thought," Oxford Bibliographies in Political Science (with Vickie Sullivan), 27 July 2016.
Michelle T. Clarke. "Machiavelli and the Imagined Rome of Renaissance Humanism," History of Political Thought 36, no. 3 (2015): 452-470.
Michelle T. Clarke. "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.
Michelle T. Clarke. "The Mythologies of Contextualism: Method and Judgment in Skinner's Visions of Politics," Political Studies 61, no. 4 (2013): 317-329.
Michelle T. Clarke. "The Virtues of Republican Citizenship in Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy," Journal of Politics 75, no. 2 (2013): 317 – 329.
Michelle T. Clarke. "Uprooting Nebuchadnezzar's Tree: Bacon's Criticism of Machiavellian Imperialism," Political Research Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2008): 367 – 378.
Michelle T. Clarke. "On the Woman Question in Machiavelli," Review of Politics 67, no. 2 (2005): 229 – 256.

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Works In Progress

Power Struggles: Freedom, Virtue, and Tyranny in Roman Political Thought (book project)

The Oxford History of Political Thought: The Renaissance, 1400-1517 (book project, under contract)

"Liberty and Republican Constitutionalism in Cicero's Pro Rabirio perduellionis reo" (article)

"Statecraft as Seduction in Machiavelli's Mandragola" (article)

"Style is the Man Himself: Eloquence and the Revival of Roman Virtue in Renaissance Humanism" (article)

Courses

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Admissions

Academics

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