He was raised in Geneva, Switzerland, where he attended university, before returning to the United States for graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He works primarily on eighteenth-century French literature, politics, and philosophy, and more generally on questions of political mythology and revolution. His first book, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), examines how liberal natural right theories, classical republicanism, and the myth of the golden age became fused in eighteenth-century political culture, only to emerge as a violent ideology during the Terror. A second book on the genealogy of the Enlightenment, also with Chicago, is forthcoming in fall 2010.