Leszek Kolakowski, "Polish philosopher" (as he is being repeatedly described in the media), has been awarded the first Kluge Prize by the Library of Congress. The official announcement is here.
The first choice for this prize is so patently politically motivated that the Prize has already discredited itself before it gets off the ground. Kolakowski has long been a favorite of conservatives being one of the few prominent humanistic intellectuals on the "right" (in some suitably loose sense of "right"). His best-known work, the 3-volume Main Currents of Marxism, is a useful reference work, but that's all: it is comprehensive, detailed, and relentlessly superficial philosophically. His other works of philosophy--books on Hume, on Husserl, etc.--are largely irrelevant to philosophical scholarship, rarely discussed, barely known.
Shame on Amartya Sen for being part of the selection panel that produced this choice.
Here is how the prize is described by the Library of Congress:
"The Kluge Prize of one million dollars is given for lifetime achievement in the humanities and social sciences -- areas of scholarship for which there are no Nobel Prizes. These disciplines include philosophy, history, political science, anthropology, sociology, religion, linguistics and criticism in the arts and literature. Nominators for the prize were asked to recommend preeminent scholars in any of these or other closely related fields whose work was recognized as outstanding by their peers, and also spoke to people in other fields and in public life."
Given that Kolakowski's work isn't even "recognized as outstanding" by his peers in philosophy, how did he make it through this "screening" process? If we were to take all the criteria seriously, a short-list of far more credible choices comes immediately to mind:
Noam Chomsky
Eric Hobsbawm
Clifford Geertz
the recently deceased Richard Wollheim (alas...)
John Searle
the recently deceased Edward Said (alas...)
Quentin Skinner
That's off the top of my head; surely a selection panel and nominators thinking about this seriously, and without regard to political pandering, would come up with even more scholars who actually meet the official criteria.
It is a depressing spectacle to see philosophy cheapened in the public arena repeatedly for blatantly political reasons. Couldn't they have picked a second-rate conservative historian or sociologist for the first prize? Sigh...
UPDATE: A reply to the disingenous post by Jacob Levy from the Volokh Conspiracy is here.
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