Cornell University, May 14-15 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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