The International Conference for the Study of Political Thought

2024 Conference Call for Papers: Archives of Political Action and Genres of Political Theory

CSPT’s 2024 Conference “Anatomies of Power: Praxis, Violence, Rule,” will take place on May 22 and 23, at Columbia University. The paper proposal submission deadline is on December 1, 2023. Read the call for papers here.

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2022 Spitz Prize Awarded to Hagar Kotef.

The David and Elaine Spitz Prize is awarded every year for the best books in liberal and/or democratic theory published two years earlier. The 2022 winner is Hagar Kotef's The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine. Please read the Prize Committee's commendations here.

Spitz Prize 2023 Call for Nominations

Did you read an outstanding book of political theory published in 2021? Did you write one? Nominate it for the Spitz Prize!

Read the call for nominations here.

The International Conference for the Study of Political Thought is an international, interdisciplinary organization of scholars and informed citizens interested in preserving and encouraging a broad, humanistic style of thinking about politics. Founded in Toronto in 1967 by J.G.A. Pocock, Melvin Richter, and Neal Wood, CSPT is now composed of an extensive network of affiliated groups and scholarly organizations. The organization aims to hold one major conference each year on a topic of broad theoretical and political significance, drawing together scholars from intellectual history, political and social theory, philosophy and related fields. In addition to our annual conference, we plan to organize smaller gatherings – workshops, lectures, panels – on contemporary themes from a theoretically and historically sensitive perspective.

We are delighted to announce that the next CSPT Conference, Archives of Political Action and Genres of Political Theory, will take place on May 22-23, 2024 at Columbia University. The conference explores the ways in which political theorizing, past and present, has been generated in and through political action and documented in a plurality of genres including political speech, petition, constitution, manifesto, and communiqué. How do archives of political rule, communication, competition, mobilization, and organization become sites of political theorizing? How does political theory shape, animate, and emerge in formal political activities such as policy-making, parliamentary debate, constitutional reform, treaty negotiation, party and church congresses, labor union and trade organization? What are some key concepts and theories that have framed and developed within informal or insurgent arenas of political action, from underground newspapers and secret societies, declarations and manifestoes, to community organizing and protest tactics? The 2024 CSPT conference will explore the relationship between political action and political theory along three interdependent dimensions—media of mobilization, archives of action, and genre. Click here for the full call for papers.