About
Michael Mosher, Ph.D., fashionably admits he is a first-generation student. He hopped a bus from North Dakota to California to work in a Safeway store and somehow got admitted to UC Berkeley and eventually to Harvard. Since then, to rehearse biographical conventions, he was pleasantly surprised by research appointments to the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (the School Social Sciences), and to the Centre de recherches internationales (CERI) at Sciences Politique in Paris. A scholar of Western political thought (Montesquieu and Hegel), Mosher was also twice a visiting lecturer at Yale University. Recent publications include two chapters in edited books on the political thought of Montesquieu including “The Cambridge Companion to Montesquieu.” With Anna Plassart, he recently edited a Bloomsbury Press volume, “The Culture of Democracy in the Age of Enlightenment.” It may be of some relevance to note that he spent two years in East Asia ten years apart on Fulbright Grants, led two study abroad trips to Tokyo, and is planning one for Shanghai, as recent writing includes a memoir about an early encounter with a future PRC politburo member and their overlapping accounts of disjunction in American democracy. In the memoir Mosher asks why political fissures became fractures, or more colloquially, citing a line for the Angela Jolie character in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, “are happy endings stories that haven’t ended yet?” The jury is still out.
Professor Mosher is on sabbatical in fall 2025 intending to recap and recapture a career studying how the l’ esprit or spirit of the laws in Montesquieu took a temporal turn to become the Geist or spirit of history in Hegel and from there to become a ghost that haunts predictive diagnosis of societies in states of disruption.
Awards and Honors
- Invited to give two lectures, in law and in philosophy, at Fudan University in Shanghai, 2023
- Member, Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science, Princeton
- Husserl Abend Lecturer, philosophy, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan
- Two Japan Fulbright Awards: (1) Tohoku University Law Faculty and Philosophy Department and (2) Tokyo University and Tsuda Women’s University
- National Endowment for the Humanities Grants, (1) Princeton University (2) University of Tulsa (3) Institute of Politics (Sciences-Po) Paris (4-5) University of Washington, Seattle
- Post-Doctoral Clark Fellow, UCLA Clark Memorial Library
- Harvard Graduate Prize Traveling Fellow, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France
- Harvard Graduate Prize Fellow
- Woodrow Wilson Fellow, Harvard University
Education
- Ph.D., Harvard University
- Dissertation: “The Spirit That Governs Cities: Modes of Human Association in the Writings of Montesquieu and Hegel”
- M.A., Harvard University
- B.A., University of California, Berkeley
Research interests and areas of expertise
- Montesquieu and Hegel
- History of Western political thought
- American political theory
- European politics
- East Asian development