The 1st Carlsbad Institute International Conference.

We cordially invite everyone to participate in the first international scientific conference on legal philosophy and political doctrines under the patronage of the Carlsbad Institute for Social Thought. We will be holding our conference at the 650 years old academic centre in Krakow, at the Jagiellonian University in cooperation with the esteemed students’ organisations: the Canon Law Students’ Association at the Faculty of Law, and the Students’ Corp. Akropolia Cracoviensis.

The discussion will be centred around the concepts of power, sovereignty and political decision and their evolution over the ages in the history of philosophy. We would like to devote a great amount of consideration to the decisionist school of philosophy. The point of departure will be the eponymous work of a great modern Greek philosopher Panagiotis Kondylis (Macht und Endscheidung), as well as the intensely debated up to this day body of work authored by Carl Schmitt, the most prominent representative of decisionist school of thought in legal philosophy.

We would like to initiate our debate by presenting the forerunners to the above, in the form of early modern developments (Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Jean Bodin), counterrevolutionary precursors to decisionism (Karl Ludwig von Haller, Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, Juan Donoso Cortes) as well as the anthropological ideas about power and will in the life of an individual as developed by Friedrich Nietzsche, with their interpolation with the realm of political doctrines. We would also like to consider, in a comparative way, parallels and mutual influences of the secular and ecclesiastical concepts of power and sovereignty.

Finally, we would appreciate any kind of comparative insight and the work putting an emphasis on argumentation for and against the relevance of the particular theories of power in the present world, verifying their descriptive accuracy. At the end, we would like to delve into the modern theoretic proposals for decision-making in the digitalised age and new re-conceptualising of the social contract in modern mass democracies.

We would be delighted to welcome especially all kinds of work and presentations, that would shed a new light on the reception of aforementioned thinkers and the conceptual history, in a way going beyond a surface-level analysis, looking for new criticisms, applications and comparisons. The outline above should be treated as a suggestion and we will welcome all work that will look at our topics of interest from an interesting and innovative angle.

Registration for active participants in the conference will be conducted via Google Forms:

https://forms.gle/xhuk1AhekydYbtuW6

The deadline for accepting abstracts is 31st October 2025, 23:59 CET.
The head of the peer review committee is Dr. Marcin Tomasiewicz

Please keep in mind that the fee for active participants will be 100 PLN / €30
(The funds will be used to cover the conference materials, catering for coffee breaks, lunch for the participants and any other organising expenses.)

We will warmly welcome all guest attendees and listeners without any fees or registration.