Isaac Stone Nakhimovsky
Bio
Isaac Nakhimovsky is Assistant Professor of History and Humanities. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University in 2008 and began teaching at Yale in 2014, after six years as a research fellow at Emmanuel College and the Faculty of History in the University of Cambridge. His research interests lie in the history of political thought, and focus primarily on European debates about economic competition and international relations in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. His first book, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte (2011), examined the postrevolutionary legacy of eighteenth-century hopes of taming intensifying interstate competition and bringing about the moral transformation of modern economic relations. He has also collaborated on a new edition of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation (2013), long considered a key text in the history of nationalism. His current projects include a study of eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism and a political history of the history of political thought since 1848.
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.
“Carl Schmitt’s Vattel and the Law of Nations between Enlightenment and Revolution,” Grotiana 31 (2010): 141-64.
“Vattel’s Theory of the International Order: Commerce and the Balance of Power in the Law of Nations,” History of European Ideas 33, no. 2 (2007): 157-73.
“The Enlightened Epicureanism of Jacques Abbadie: L’Art de se connoître soi-même and the Morality of Self-Interest,” History of European Ideas 29, no. 2 (2003): 1-14.