After reading Litterae Humaniores at Wadham College, Oxford, on a Rhodes Scholarship from 1971-1974, Paul A. Rahe completed a Ph.D. in ancient history at Yale University under the direction of Donald Kagan in 1977. In subsequent years, he taught at Cornell University, Franklin and Marshall College, and the University of Tulsa, where he spent twenty-four years before accepting a position at Hillsdale College, where he is Professor of History and holds The Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage.

Professor Rahe's entire scholarly career has been focused on two subjects: the origins and evolution of self-government within the West, and the interplay between politics, diplomacy, and war. His range is considerable. His first book, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (1992), was 1200 pages in length and surveyed the origins and development of self-government in ancient Greece and Rome, its re-emergence in a new form in the Middle Ages, the transformation it underwent at the hands of the political philosophers of early modernity, and the statesmanship of the American Founding Fathers. Within the first thirteen months of publication, the hardback edition sold out. Thereafter, it reappeared as an alternative selection of the History Book Club. In 1994, it was reissued in a three-volume paperback edition by the University of North Carolina Press, and it remains in print.

In the course of his career, Professor Rahe has published dozens of chapters on related subjects in edited books and scholarly articles in journals such as The American Journal of Philology, Historia, The American Journal of Archaeology, The American Historical Review, The Review of Politics, History of Political Thought, The American Journal of Business and Professional Ethics, The Journal of the Historical Society, Social Philosophy & Policy, Security Studies, The National Interest, The American Interest, and The Woodrow Wilson Quarterly. He spent two years in Istanbul, Turkey in the mid-1980s as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs; he has been awarded research fellowships by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Earhart Foundation; and he has held research fellowships at the Center for Hellenic Study, the National Humanities Center, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D. C. , Clare College at Cambridge University, All Souls College at Oxford University, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; and he has given a host of public lectures at universities in the United States and abroad--most recently at the Hebrew University, at Al-Quds University, at Shalem College in Jerusalem, at the Sorbonne in Paris, at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst in England, at the Free University in Berlin, and at the Marine Corps University in Quantico. In 1997-98, he was named to the Templeton Honor Rolls for Education in a Free Society by The John M. Templeton Foundation. In 2006 the Society for French Historical Studies awarded him the Koren Prize for the Best Article Published in French History the preceding year. In October 2019, the Mackinder Forum named his book Sparta's First Attic War: The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta, 478-446 B.C. the book of the year for excellence in geopolitical analysis. And, in April 2022, the University of Piraeus in Athens, Greece conferred on him the Themistocles Statesmanship Award.

Professor Rahe co-edited Montesquieu's Science of Politics: Essays on the Spirit of Laws (2001) with David W. Carrithers and Michael A. Mosher, and he edited Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy (2006). His second book, Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory under the English Republic, which examines the political thought inspired by the abortive republican experiment that took place in England in the period stretching from 1649 to 1660, was published by Cambridge University Press in April, 2008. His third and fourth books, Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty: War, Religion, Commerce, Climate, Terrain, Technology, Uneasiness of Mind, the Spirit of Political Vigilance, and the Foundations of the Modern Republic and Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Tocqueville on the Modern Prospect, were published by Yale University Press in 2009.

Since that time, Professor Rahe has been working on a series of volumes focused on the grand strategy articulated and re-articulated time and again by ancient Sparta. Four of these volumes -- The Spartan Regime: Its Character, Origins, and Grand Strategy; The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta: The Persian Challenge; Sparta's First Attic War: The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta, 478-446 B.C.; and Sparta's Second Attic War: The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta, 446-418 B. C.-- have been published by Yale University. Sparta's Sicilian Proxy War: The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta, 418-413 B. C. was published by Encounter Books in September, 2023 and Sparta's Third Attic War: The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta, 413-404 B.C. is slated for publication in 2024. He hopes to complete the series with a volume on Sparta's Imperial Venture.