CSPT is pleased to announce the winner for the 2026 Prize: Emily "Sal" Salamanca, for her doctoral dissertation, “Legitimizing Luxury: Sumptuary Laws and Democratic Aesthetics in Athens, Rome, and Venice.”

​​

Statement submitted by the Selection Committee for the Melvin Richter Prize:

Pratap Mehta (Chair)
Teresa Bejan

Michael Gorup

 

The International Conference for the Study of Political Thought (CSPT) has awarded Emily Salamanca the 202 Melvin Richter Prize for the best dissertation in the history of political thought.

​

Emily Salamanca's "Legitimizing Luxury: Sumptuary Laws and Democratic Aesthetics in Athens, Rome, and Venice" is an outstanding dissertation. Salamanca advances a novel argument:  Sumptuary regulations governing the display of luxury or excess in Athens, Rome, and Venice were not primarily aimed at curbing luxury. Instead, they were strategies used by elites to secure their own power and legitimacy in the face of growing inequality and popular critique. Far from reducing inequality, these measures, to varying degrees, legitimized inequality and allowed dominant groups to exercise greater social control over non-dominant groups, especially women. Salamanca shows, with remarkable subtlety, how these republics could maintain their own myths of civic equality and virtue in the face of inequality and elite excess. Salamanca establishes this argument with breathtaking erudition, reading a wide range of sources with immense sophistication and care.

​

This dissertation will be a landmark contribution to several important debates. It provides a strikingly original account of debates over luxury and sumptuary legislation in the history of political and legal thought. The brilliantly detailed study of sumptuary laws in these republics recasts our understanding of the character of republicanism in Athens, Rome, and Venice. It destabilizes the standard opposition between republican virtue and luxury.  Anti-luxury discourse in republics was often aimed at politically stabilizing inequality, not cultivating virtue. The dissertation also deepens our understanding of the functions of law: how law and regulation ostensibly aimed at curbing elite power can actually conceal it. In doing so, it speaks powerfully to debates in contemporary democracies over how elites can perform virtue and equality, as it were, while keeping the underlying structures of power intact.

​

In many ways, this is a model dissertation: ambitious, bold, rigorously argued, and written with clarity and a propulsive power. It manages to weave complex historical detail into a sustained and elegant argument. The Committee is delighted to recommend Emily Salamanca for the Melvin Richter Prize.