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Eric Nelson Named Professor of Government at Harvard
Cambridge, Mass. - June 14, 2010 - Political theorist Eric Nelson, whose work has traced the history of republicanism from the ancient Greeks and Romans through the Renaissance to the present day, has been named professor of government at Harvard University.
Nelson was previously Frederick S. Danziger Associate Professor of Government at Harvard, where he has been a member of the faculty since 2005.
"Professor Nelson's work is uncommonly erudite and stunningly original," says Stephen Kosslyn, dean of social science in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "In a relatively brief time, he has made genuinely novel observations about authors, texts, and intellectual traditions that have been studied for generations by some of the world's most distinguished historians and philosophers. Indeed, his books are less contributions to mainstream political theory than overturnings of conventional wisdom."
Nelson is the author of three books. His first, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2004), drew an important distinction between Greek and Roman republicans, long combined by historians in a single category. Nelson points out a key limitation of this approach, noting that while Roman republicans viewed the preservation of private property as paramount to civic society, Greek republicans saw acute differences in wealth as both dangerous and unjust. He then proceeds to revisit our understanding of a series of important writers in light of this revised understanding of ancient republicanism, culminating in a strikingly original reanalysis of the ideology implicit in the texts of America's founding fathers.
Nelson's second work, Thomas Hobbes: Translations of Homer (Oxford University Press, 2008), presents a two-volume translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey undertaken when the 17th-century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes was in his 80s. This work shows how these translations of Homer's work reflect Hobbes' own concerns about governance and his anxiety about the power of rhetoric in human affairs. Nelson combs over Hobbes' translations in meticulous detail, documenting the fascinating way in which he shifted Homer's original meaning to align the poems with a Hobbesian moral and political philosophy.
Nelson's most recent book, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Harvard University Press, 2010), draws on early modern political theory and Hebrew scholarship from the Talmud to the 17th century. His analysis demonstrates how the reawakening of interest in the Hebrew Bible and Jewish scholarship shaped views on government that took hold in Europe during the Protestant Reformation. Specifically, he traces the widespread notion that only a republican form of government can claim full legitimacy to early modern reflection on the divinely authorized character of the Hebrew commonwealth.
Nelson has also published several influential papers in Political Theory, one of the leading journals in the field, including one taking issue with the distinction between "negative" and "positive" liberty espoused by many contemporary political theorists. In this piece, he argues that all liberty is essentially "negative," implying the absence of some constraint.
Nelson graduated from Harvard College in 1999 with an A.B. in history, winning a Marshall Scholarship to fund continued study in the U.K. He earned his M.Phil. and Ph.D. in history from Cambridge University in 2000 and 2002, respectively. He was a research fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 2001 to 2003, when he became a junior fellow at Harvard. Nelson was named assistant professor of government in 2005, assuming the Danziger Professorship in 2009.
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