About

Dan Edelstein is the William H. Bonsall Professor of French, a professor by courtesy of History and Political Science, and a Senior Fellow by courtesy at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He holds a Ph.D. in French from the University of Pennsylvania, obtained in 2004, and a Licence ès Lettres from the Université de Genève. Born in Ithaca, NY, he moved to Geneva, Switzerland, at the age of eleven, where he attended Collège Calvin and studied literature at the University of Geneva. He joined Stanford's Department of French & Italian in 2004. Edelstein's research primarily focuses on eighteenth-century France, with interests at the intersection of literature, history, political thought, and digital humanities. He is the author of four books, including works on the French revolutionary Terror, the genealogy of the Enlightenment, the early-modern history of human rights, and an intellectual history of revolution from Thucydides to Lenin titled 'The Revolution to Come.' He has also edited or co-edited seven volumes of essays on topics such as myth and modernity, the Enlightenment, revolution, and rights. Additionally, he was a principal investigator for the 'Mapping the Republic of Letters' project and the founding faculty director of the 'Humanities + Design' research lab at CESTA. Edelstein teaches courses on the literature, philosophy, culture, and politics of the Enlightenment; nineteenth-century French novels; the French Revolution; early-modern political thought; French intellectual culture; liberal education; and historical networks. His work integrates digital humanities methods and he is actively involved in research and teaching that explore the intersections of these fields.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Law
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Physics
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• Plutarch and Machiavelli: The Politics of Prudence

  Political Theory · 2025-03-12

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Plutarch and Machiavelli: What could they have in common? Machiavelli may have mined Plutarch for historical exempla, but his political arguments could not be more different. Or could they? In this article, I make the case that Plutarch in fact is the source of some of the more iconoclastic claims of The Prince , from the conquest of fortune to the importance of being feared, and even the necessity, on occasion, of immoral acts. If this connection has been overlooked, I suggest, in conclusion, it is because we have artificially segregated Plutarch and Machiavelli into “moralist” and “realist” camps when both actually participate in a common style of political thought, which can be called “prudential politics.”

  PublisherDOI

• Rethinking Word Similarity: Semantic Similarity through Classification Confusion

  2025-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Kaitlyn Zhou, Haishan Gao, Sarah Li Chen, Dan Edelstein, Dan Jurafsky, Chen Shani. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Rethinking Word Similarity: Semantic Similarity through Classification Confusion

  ArXiv.org · 2025-02-08

  preprintOpen access

  Word similarity has many applications to social science and cultural analytics tasks like measuring meaning change over time and making sense of contested terms. Yet traditional similarity methods based on cosine similarity between word embeddings cannot capture the context-dependent, asymmetrical, polysemous nature of semantic similarity. We propose a new measure of similarity, Word Confusion, that reframes semantic similarity in terms of feature-based classification confusion. Word Confusion is inspired by Tversky's suggestion that similarity features be chosen dynamically. Here we train a classifier to map contextual embeddings to word identities and use the classifier confusion (the probability of choosing a confounding word c instead of the correct target word t) as a measure of the similarity of c and t. The set of potential confounding words acts as the chosen features. Our method is comparable to cosine similarity in matching human similarity judgments across several datasets (MEN, WirdSim353, and SimLex), and can measure similarity using predetermined features of interest. We demonstrate our model's ability to make use of dynamic features by applying it to test a hypothesis about changes in the 18th C. meaning of the French word "revolution" from popular to state action during the French Revolution. We hope this reimagining of semantic similarity will inspire the development of new tools that better capture the multi-faceted and dynamic nature of language, advancing the fields of computational social science and cultural analytics and beyond.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How Republics Die: Plutarch and the Intra-elite Rivalries that Destroyed the Roman Commonwealth

  History of Political Thought · 2024-08-31 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Plutarch's Roman Lives present an unusual, if historically compelling, account of why the Roman Republic collapsed. Drawing on Polybius' political theory (sketched out in Histories 6.57), Plutarch suggests that after the fall of Carthage, traditional competition among elites began to spiral out of control. Not only did competition lead to increasingly violent clashes over scarce honours, it exacerbated the tensions between social classes, which the elites played off each other for personal gain. As the stakes of these rivalries increased, so too did the temptation to ignore or undo customary norms, especially for limits on executive offices. Intra-elite rivalry was doubly destructive: it led to the dismantling of the constitution and unleashed civil violence, and ultimately revolution. The political lesson that Plutarch provides is that elite rivalry must be skilfully managed in order to avoid winner-takes-all and oneupmanship.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction to Volume <scp>IV</scp>

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-11-28

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• On the liberties of the ancients: licentiousness, equal rights, and the rule of law

  History of European Ideas · 2023 · 11 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Law
  • Political Science

  In this article, we discuss Greek and Roman conceptions of liberty. The supposedly ‘neo-Roman’ view of liberty as non-domination is really derived from negative Greek models, we argue, while Roman authors devised an alternative understanding of liberty that rested on the equality of legal rights. In this ‘paleo-Roman’ model, as long as the law was the same for all, you were free; whether or not you participated in making the law was not a constitutive feature of liberty. In essence, this Roman theory was a theory of freedom as the rule of law and the guarantee of equal rights, especially due process rights. For this Roman concept of ‘legal liberty,’ as we call it, political participation was neither necessary nor sufficient. Theorized by Cicero and historicized by Livy, the Roman understanding of freedom flourished in early-modern times, proving important to paradigmatic republican authors such as Machiavelli and Rousseau as well as to Hobbes, whose work we discuss as a helpful point of comparison.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• :<i>Capitalism and the Emergence of Civic Equality in Eighteenth-Century France</i>

  The Journal of Modern History · 2022-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Historical Sublime

  2022-12-15 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Where Kant famously described how certain events, spectacles, or monuments could produce the aesthetic sense of the sublime, this chapter explores how historical inquiries and observation can create similar effects. Drawing on Goethe and Stendhal’s travel writing, as well as on comments by Machiavelli and Montaigne, the chapter shows how these authors described encounters with the distant past as both a vertiginous and soothing experience. Staring down the rabbit hole of history can make the observer feel insignificant; but at the same time, it puts the present into perspective and provides a counterweight to apocalyptic or nihilistic thinking.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>You Say You Want a Revolution? Radical Idealism and Its Tragic Consequences</i>. By Daniel Chirot. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. Pp. xii+174. $29.95 (cloth).

  The Journal of Modern History · 2022-03-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Public Welfare and the Natural Order

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-01-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  It is now well acknowledged that socio-economic rights were already recognised and defended at the time of the French Revolution. The aim of this chapter is not simply to extend the genealogy of socio-economic rights farther back. I wish to show that both socio-economic and political rights, during the French Revolution, came from the same intellectual source, namely the belief in a naturally regulated economic sphere. This belief would find its peak expression in Physiocracy, but it also informed a number of other liberal movements. Going back to the late seventeenth century, one even finds the assertion of socio-economic rights before that of political ones. Economic liberalism, in this sense, came before, but also paved the way for, political liberalism. This process extended up to the French Revolution, where it was deputies with strong Physiocratic attachments who pushed for both socio-economic and political rights.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Schreibens Zwischen Autor

  University of Chicago

  16 shared

• Sara-Marie Demiriz

  16 shared

• Maria Schnack

  University of Chicago

  16 shared

• Lynn Miller

  University of Chicago

  16 shared

• France Meets

  Harvard University Press

  16 shared

• Anne Otto

  Intelligent Transport Systems Niedersachsen

  16 shared

• Nina Gallion

  University of Chicago

  16 shared

• Martin Göllnitz

  Philipps University of Marburg

  16 shared

Education

• B.A., Literature

  University of Geneva

• Ph.D.

  University of Pennsylvania

  2004