​CSPT Conference

Cornell University, May 2026

 

From theories of constitutional cycling and devolution in Plato and Polybius to Machiavelli’s
reflections on the challenges of sustaining the free republic in time, from Jefferson and Burke’s
intergenerational social contract to Marx’s historical dialectics of social transformation, from Du
Bois’ Black Reconstruction to Fanon’s colonial “ordering of the world,” political theorists have
reflected time and again on political form and historical change. How do regimes,
constitutions, states, ruling structures change, endure, decay, decline? When does one polity
become something new?

Change and continuity raise core questions about how to define, classify, and compare diverse
political forms. Is a regime’s identity coterminous with its institutions and internal structures of
rule, its prevailing ideology and how rule is legitimated, or the social relations and psychological
habits that it cultivates? How do ideology and modes of sociality operate to concretely
authorize and reproduce, as well as transform and disrupt, diverse political forms? How are
political forms, such as systems of property and electoral institutions, entangled with, even
engineered to preserve or restructure, social relations? How does ideology function to shore
up and mask injustice and domination, on the one hand, and build transformative power in the
service of emancipatory change, on the other. How do the norms and practices of sociality,
from civic and family life, market interactions and workplace relationships, sexual mores and
marriage customs, to cultures of deference, equality, and solidarity entrench, resist, or
transfigure political institutions?

From classical analyses of rule by one, few, or many, to contemporary concerns about
democracy, populism, and authoritarianism, what other polities might be usefully characterized
as distinct political forms? For example, what are the defining features of slave, settler, and
emancipation regimes; empires and federations; revolutionary, developmental, postcolonial,
postliberal states? Strict classification can often mask the persistence of older forms in the
new. Just as psychoanalysis reveals the return of repressed drives in the patterned repetitions
of our everyday practices, political theory examines the complex ways that political forms adapt
and persist even through periods of crisis and revolutionary rupture. Absolutism persists within
democracy, feudalism within capitalism, the colonial within the postcolonial, patriarchy within
liberalism, the theological within the secular, the mythic within the scientific, the barbaric
within the civilized. How have political thinkers understood and tracked the preservation of the
archaic in changed and transfigured forms?

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The 2026 CSPT conference invites papers that explore the persistence of political form along
three dimensions—regime, ideology, and social reproduction. 


Please send paper proposals of no more than 1000 words along with a short CV
to coordinator@icspt.org with the subject line “CSPT 2026 Submission” by June 1, 2025.
Notification of acceptance will be sent out in June 2025. Accepted papers are to be submitted
in April 2026 and will be pre-circulated to all participants. CSPT and Cornell University will cover
travel and accommodations for all panelists. 

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