CSPT is pleased to announce the winner for the 2025 Prize:

Olivier Grégoire Higgins, for his doctoral dissertation: “Progress and the People in German Political Thought after Kant 1781-1831.”

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

Shannon Stimson (Chair)
Loubna El Amine
William G. Selinger

 

The International Conference for the Study of Political Thought (CSPT) has awarded Olivier Grégoire Higgins the 2025 Melvin Richter Prize for the best dissertation in the history of political thought.

The selection committee was impressed with Higgins's bold and beautifully written analysis of the reworking of political idealism in post-Kantian thought.  Higgins's argument rests on a deep and substantively researched trove of the emergence of the Volk, deftly combining philosophical, historical, and political analysis. The dissertation shows how post-Kantian German philosophers reimagined Kant’s political idealism for a world shaped by the French Revolution, reworking Kant’s commitment to a “republican minded monarch” into an investment in the central role of the people suitable for “new political conditions.”  Reconstructing the diverse ways in which authors such as Hegel, Schleiermacher, and Fichte envisioned the people as the subject of modern politics, Higgins brings to life the German contribution to the theory of the modern popular state.

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