Isaac Nakhimovsky, currently working on a book entitled A World Reformed: Liberalism, the Holy Alliance, and the Problems of Global Order, visited University of Lausanne to present a draft chapter of his ongoing project and discuss his work with two research teams at UNIL, the team responsible for the FNS project Educating Russia’s Princes: Swiss enlightened tutors at the court of Catherine the Great (prof. Danièle Tosato-Rigo and Mathieu Clément) and the research team of the project on the Enlightenment Agrarian Republics. A presentation based on a draft chapter given at the research seminar in modern history (Monday, 19.04.2018) was followed by a roundtable comprised of our guest and the two aforementioned research teams (Tuesday, 20.04.2018), where the three ongoing projects were discussed with particular emphasis on their commonalities and intersections.
Isaac Nakhimovsky is Assistant Professor of History and Humanities at Yale University. 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 the University of Cambridge. His first book, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte (2011), showed how, in the context of the French Revolution, the German philosopher J.G. Fichte came to construct what remains the most systematic Western treatment of the political theory of economic independence. He has also collaborated with Béla Kapossy on an edition of Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation (2013), and two volumes of essays on eighteenth-century political thought and its post-revolutionary legacies: Commerce and Peace in the Enlightenment (2017), and Markets, Morals, Politics: Jealousy of Trade and the History of Political Thought (2018).