Isaac Stone Nakhimovsky

Assistant Professor of History and Yale College Humanities

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(203) 432-1396

Fields of interest: Intellectual history of Europe since the 17th century; history of political thought; historiography of international law and political economy

Bio

Isaac Nakhimovsky is Associate Professor of History and Humanities. His first book, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte (Princeton, 2011), shows how, in the context of the French Revolution, the German philosopher J.G. Fichte came to theorize economic independence as an ideal, and developed a systematic political theory of what John Maynard Keynes later termed “national self-sufficiency.” He has also collaborated on an edition of Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation (Hackett, 2013), and two volumes of essays on eighteenth-century political thought and its post-revolutionary legacies: Commerce and Peace in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2017), and Markets, Morals, Politics: Jealousy of Trade and the History of Political Thought (Harvard, 2018). His next book, The Most Liberal of All Ideas: The Political Thought of the Holy Alliance, is under contract for Princeton University Press. In June 2022 he will deliver the Quentin Skinner Lecture at the University of Cambridge (postponed since 2020).

Selected other publications:

“Georg Lukács and Revolutionary Realpolitik, 1918–19: An Essay on Ethical Action, Historical Judgment, and the History of Political Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 83, no. 1 (2022): 63-85.

An International Dilemma: The Postwar Utopianism of Gunnar Myrdal’s Beyond the Welfare State,” Humanity 8, no. 1 (2017): 185-94

“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.