Laureate 2015
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt is one of the twentieth century’s most important political thinkers. The German-Jewish philosopher was born in 1906 and grew up in Königsberg. She studied philosophy under Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. When the Nazi regime came to power, she fled via Paris to the United States, where she lived until her death in 1975.
Laureate 2014
Susan Neiman
American moral philosopher Susan Neiman (1955) is director of the Einstein Forum research institute in Potsdam. She studied philosophy at Harvard University as well as Berlin’s Freie Universität and was an Associate Professor at Yale University and Tel Aviv University.
Neiman writes scientific works as well as works for a broader audience.
Laureate 2013
Immanuel Kant
In the last two centuries, few thinkers have left a mark as clear as Immanuel Kant. Kant’s works, especially his Critique of Pure Reason (1781 and 1787), brought about a philosophical upheaval as important as the political changes caused by the French revolution of 1789.
Laureate 2012
Pierre Rosanvallon
Pierre Rosanvallon is one of today’s most important and diverse political thinkers. In addition to the position of Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), he has held the Chair of Modern and Contemporary History of Politics at the Collège de France since 2001. He also plays a leading role in the political debate, for instance through the think-tank La République des Idées, established in 2002, to which the website La Vie des Idées (www.laviedesidees.fr) was added in 2007.
Laureate 2011 Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was selected within the theme ‘democratie in opspraak’ (‘compromised democracy’). This French philosopher’s thoughts about a state that is structured to take care of its people without taking away their freedom, constituted a new movement.
Laureate 2010
Richard Sennett
Richard Sennett was born in Chicago in 1943. He grew up in the Cabrini Green Housing project, one of the first multi-ethnic social housing projects in the United States. As a six-year-old, he started studying the piano and the cello and worked with Frank Miller of the Chicago Symphony and Claus Adam of the Julliard Quartet. Sennett was one of the last students of the conductor Pierre Monteux. In 1963, a hand injury meant a sudden end of his musical career. He then turned to academics.
Laureate 2008
Michael Walzer
Michael Walzer (New York, 1935) is one of the most prominent political thinkers of our time. He has published innumerable books and articles about the duties of politics, nationality and ethnicity, and economic justice in the welfare state.
Laureate 2006
Donna Dickenson
Born in New England in 1946, Donna Dickenson obtained her BA in Political Science from Wellesley College and her MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics. After leaving the United States in protest against the Vietnam War, she settled in England, where her son and daughter were born. In addition to her academic posts, she has worked in a court reform project in New York City, a futurology institute, and the main New York newsroom of the Associated Press.
Laureate 2004
Tzvetan Todorov
Tzvetan Todorov was born, as he puts it, at the worst time of the 20th century in communist Bulgaria: “the year that the pact between Germany and the Soviet Union was made, that (…) Stalin and Hitler shook each other’s hand.”. In 1963 he flees communism and settles in Paris, but totalitarian society will continue to be one of his major political themes.
Laureate 2002
Avishai Margalit
Avishai Margalit lives in Jeruzalem and works there as a professor of Philosophy at Hebrew University. In recent years he has mainly been busy with political philosophy. In his thinking, he, in a surprising way, uses the notion of decency as a measure of civilization/culture.
