The International Conference for the Study of Political Thought (CSPT) has awarded Shterna Friedman the 2024 Melvin Richter Prize for her doctoral dissertation: Kant, Hegel, and the Rise of Systemic Social Theory.
The Richter family established the Melvin Richter Prize as a tribute to Mel Richter, one of the founders of CSPT and a generous and unstinting mentor to younger scholars throughout his long career.
The annual prize celebrates the best dissertation in the history of political thought. The selection committee was impressed with Friedman’s bold thesis, which centers on the notion that the language of systemic injustice is so central to recent intellectual life in the public sphere, and across the humanities and social sciences, that we have almost entirely forgotten its intellectual origins in theological debates.
The committee noted that her “subtle and sharply observed interventions in the complex scholarly debates on German idealism—in which she carefully parses the underlying assumptions, implications, and structural problems in the writings of Kant and Hegel—is a tour de force of historical and philosophical reconstruction.”
Friedman is a political theorist and College Fellow in Social Studies. Her work examines the epistemological and metaphysical foundations of systemic social theory as developed by the German Idealists (especially Kant and Hegel), and further elaborated and criticized by such later thinkers as Marx and Foucault. She received her PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2023. Prior to that, she majored in philosophy at Barnard College, and received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Congratulations to Shterna Friedman on this impressive accolade.