Last year's prize, the first one, to Leszek Kolakowski, was clearly politically motivated and a weak choice: whatever prestige the prize might have had was squandered. (For my comments on last year's prize and some of the controversy they generated, see here and here). This year's prize has been awarded to the historian Jaroslva Pelikan and the philosopher Paul Ricoeur. I know nothing of Pelikan's work, or whether he is a meritorious choice, but at least in the case of Ricoeur, there is no reason to think political pandering to the right was a factor in the selection. Of philosophers in the hermeneutic tradition, Ricoeur's shelf life, to be sure, is unlikely to approach that of Dilthey's or Gadamer's, though I must confess that apart from the 1970 Freud and Philosophy--a book which gets Freud rather wrong, but interestingly so--I have read very little of his corpus (among those interested in 20th-century European philosophy, I expect this is not atypical--indeed, as Michael Rosen and I work with the contributors to The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy we find that Ricoeur's work has come up not at all). So at least from this small corner of the academic universe, this year's choices provoke nothing more than a large yawn.
It is still worth remarking, perhaps, that if the stated criteria were to be taken at all seriously, namely,
the Kluge prize rewards lifetime achievement in the wide range of disciplines not covered by the Nobel prizes. Such disciplines include history, philosophy, politics, anthropology, sociology, religion, criticism in the arts and humanities, and linguistics. The award is at the financial level of the Nobel awards.
The prize is international; the recipient may be of any nationality, writing in any language. The main criterion for a recipient of the Kluge Prize is deep intellectual accomplishment in the human sciences. The recipient's body of work should evidence growth in maturity and range over the years. The recipient will have demonstrated unusual distinction within a given area of inquiry and across disciplines in the human sciences. Significantly, the recipient's writings should be, in large part, understandable and important for those involved in public affairs,
then the only explanation for why Noam Chomsky was not the first recipient (or, now, the second) is pure political bias, since he so plainly towers over Kolakowski and Ricoeur (and just about everybody else) on the stated dimensions of merit. But don't expect this kind of political bias infecting academic decision-making to attract any attention in the American media.
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