Rutgers-Camden professor Jacob Soll wins MacArthur grant

Let's say someone calls to tell you you've just won a MacArthur grant of $500,000.

How would you react?

Jacob Soll, 42, just won one. He was among the 22 new MacArthur Fellows announced at 12:30 a.m. Tuesday. He's in wonderful company, including the poets Kay Ryan and A.E. Stallings; radio guy Jad Abumrad of WNYC's science show Radiolab; the Latin jazz master Dafnis Prieto; the parasitologist Elodie Ghedin of the University of Pittsburgh; and the Chicago architect Jeanne Gang.

Soll says he thought it was a practical joke at first.

"I was walking in the rain, and they called, and I didn't believe it," he says. "And I called them back, as in 'What is this? Is this for real? Is this some practical joke?' I didn't know what it was - I thought maybe they wanted a recommendation. Then it hit me. I almost fainted. It's crazy."

The MacArthur Fellowship is for five years and $500,000, no strings attached. About 850 people have received MacArthurs since the program began in 1981.

Soll, a professor of history at Rutgers-Camden, lives in West Philadelphia. He's this area's lone MacArthur grantee this year, with a specialty in the history of early modern Europe, especially in the 16th to 18th centuries. The MacArthur website praises him for "opening up new fields of inquiry and elucidating how modern governments came into being."

Soll cares about his fields of study. He's nothing if not animated, especially if you ask him about one of his passions, the work of Niccolò Machiavelli, about whom he wrote in his 2005 book Publishing 'The Prince.'

"He's such a huge figure," Soll says, "but when I started studying him, I discovered he's even bigger than people ever thought. His works were cut up and distributed, without his name on them, and he gets into all sorts of unsuspected places."

Soll says he became "almost like a geneticist, following the trail of this crazy DNA." Machiavelli turns out to be a founder of "modern political science, one in which you look rationally and critically at what political leaders do, and see what their real goals are and the means they use to achieve them." Machiavelli's dry-eyed, sometimes coldly rational, even cynical look at real people and real power was an early awakening of the modern.

"His ideas are implicit in the way we see government today," Soll says. "And I wish we had more of his kind of criticism of our leaders."