Peter Thomas

Biography

I study European political thought and intellectual history in those centuries we have learned to call “early modern.” I am especially interested in how classical ideas were reinvented during the Italian Renaissance.

I tend to affirm, with the so-called “‘so-called ‘Cambridge School,’” that ideas consist in their linguistic articulations and that those articulations are best understood historically in the intellectual and ideological contexts that they constitute and inform. In this respect, I am most fascinated by political thought that evinces an awareness of language itself as an instrument—if not the essence—of knowledge and power.

At the moment, my primary interests fall under the rubric “Rhetoric and the Renaissance City,” which is also the title of my dissertation. I am exploring how humanists of the period ca. 1350 to 1550 configured their moral and political philosophy around a distinctive account the role of eloquence in founding and maintaining civil associations retrieved mainly from Cicero’s De oratore. I am also interested in the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, the career of J. G. A. Pocock, the history of political thought in colonial and revolutionary America, and the methods and métier of the intellectual historian.