Jacob Soll

Jacob Soll is university professor and professor of philosophy, history and accounting at the University of Southern California. Soll's work examines the mechanics of politics, statecraft and economics by dissecting the various elements of how modern states and political systems succeed and fail. He studies the philosophies of political and economic freedom with a focus on the relationship of the individual to the state. His first book, Publishing ¨The Prince¨: Reading, History, and the Birth of Political Criticism," (2005) a study of the influence of Machiavelli's theory of prudence from the Enlightenment to the Renaissance, won the 2005 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History. Soll was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009 to write his second book, The Information Master: Jean Baptiste Colbert's State Information System, a history of Louis XIV's famous finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert's use of information in state-building. In 2011 he was awarded a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship, known as the "Genius Grant" for his work on the history of the state.