Political Theorist.
Christopher Scott
McClure
My work examines the connection between political philosophy and the arts: how thinkers use images, stories, and literary form to shape the way citizens understand themselves and their common life. I am especially interested in what happens when there is no shared agreement about the highest things. My first book, Hobbes and the Artifice of Eternity, argues that Leviathan is an educative work of art as much as a philosophic treatise. My current research returns to Hobbes’s account of poetry and imagination, asking how moral and civic formation can occur in an age of doubt and uncertainty. Alongside my academic work, I have spent a decade writing and producing narrative television and audio fiction, practical experience in how ideas take hold through image, character, pacing, and emotion.
Toronto, 2026
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Research
Hobbes and the Artifice of Eternity
Cambridge University Press, 2016
Journal Articles
- “Sculpting Modernity: Machiavelli and Michelangelo's David” Interpretation, 2016
- “Learning from Franklin's Mistakes: Self-Interest Rightly Understood in the Autobiography” The Review of Politics 76 (2014): 69–82
- “War, Madness and Death: The Paradox of Honor in Hobbes's Leviathan” The Journal of Politics 76 (2014): 114–125
- “Hell and Anxiety in Hobbes's Leviathan” The Review of Politics 73 (2011): 1–27
- “No Country for Old Gods” Perspectives on Political Science 39 (2010): 46–51
- “Stopping to Smell the Roses” Perspectives on Political Science 37 (2008): 99–108
Current Research
A working paper on Thomas Hobbes's 1650 response to William Davenant's preface to Gondibert, arguing that Hobbes gives poetry and Fancy a central role in moral education precisely where judgment and demonstration fail. Read alongside Leviathan, the exchange reveals a Hobbes for whom political philosophy must work through image, imagination, and literary form as well as argument.
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Teaching & Appointments
Tufts University
Part-Time Lecturer, Political Science · Fall 2024
Yorkville University
Adjunct Faculty · 2021–2023
Harvard University
Postdoctoral Fellow, Program on Constitutional Government · 2013–2015
University of California, Davis
Visiting Assistant Professor, Political Science · 2011–2013
- The Political Philosophy of Nietzsche
- Early Modern Political Thought
- Late Modern Political Thought
- Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy
- American Political Thought
- Introduction to Political Theory
- War: Thucydides, Kant and Schmitt
- Despotism in Montesquieu and Herodotus
- Creative Arts in a Political and Public Policy Context
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On Both Halves of This Page
My academic work and my work in narrative media have long revolved around the same question: how ideas become vivid enough to shape the way people understand themselves and their common world. After my postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, I began working in documentary television and audio fiction while continuing to teach and write. That work gave me practical experience with the power of image, character, pacing, and emotion — questions that are also central to my research on Hobbes, political philosophy, and the arts. The Reading Group, which I started in 2026, brings these strands together through the close reading of classic texts in a public setting.
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Story & Screen
Since 2016 I've worked as a producer and story developer for documentary television and audio fiction — research, interviewing, editorial supervision, and post-production for series built around real cases and testimony, alongside two serialized audio dramas of my own creation.
Two Canada Council for the Arts grants · Audio Verse Awards, Best Production & Best Storyteller · Hillman Prize in Broadcast Journalism (nomination)
- Associate Producer, Final Twist (CentreDrive Media) 2026–
- Series Producer, documentary series for Paramount+ & Discovery+ (Bright North Studios) 2022–2025
- Creator & producer, The Milkman of St. Gaff's 2020–
- Creator & producer, Harvey in Hell 2026–
- Creator & co-host, The Reading Group 2026–