Welcome to my website. I am a lecturer in Political Theory in the Government Department at Harvard University.

I am a political theorist who uses resources from the history of political thought to try to clarify problems in contemporary political theory. My book manuscript, “The Politics of Natural Society,” shows how a variety of eighteenth-century political theorists constructed an opposition between what society does ‘naturally’ of its own accord, and what it does by dint of politics or as a result of deliberate human reasoning. This led theorists like Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, and Adam Smith, to reinterpret the relationship between the political theorist and the society they wrote about. In the wake of Smith, the concept of natural society also played a key role in consolidating the tradition Karl Marx would call ‘classical political economy,’ and informed his critique of it.

Building on existing scholarship on the emergence of commercial society in the eighteenth century, I argue that the conceptual language of natural society played a key role in cementing the foundations of a political ideology which we today know as liberalism. Following radical democratic theory, I argue that this way of thinking about society led Paine, Smith, Burke, and the classical political economists to each, in different ways, subordinate politics to society by imagining politics as the facilitation of society’s nature. The dissertation argues that this created serious aporias for how we imagine the relationship between politics and society today.

The chapter on Paine has recently been published in American Political Thought: https://doi.org/10.1086/736328.

At Harvard, I teach seminars on the political thought of the American and French Revolutions, American political thought, and political theory and economics.

My public writing on literature and politics has appeared in venues like Dissent Magazine, The American Prospect, and The Cleveland Review of Books.