Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought
2012: Yfaat Weiss
Yfaat Weiss is a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. According to the jury, Weiss received the award for her exposure of the unusual course of Israeli history and for noting the great potential of civil society in her country.
2011: Navid Kermani
As an academic in the field of Islamic Studies, Navid Kermani has written books and articles about the Islamic world and the Muslim community in Germany, among other topics. He was awarded this prize, not only for his work as a journalist and author, but also for his involvement in interreligious dialogues between Muslims and Christians.
2010: François Jullien
François Jullien is a philosopher and sinologist (expert in the field of Chinese Studies). His awareness and understanding of China and Chinese thinking has helped to illustrate the limits of western thought. By crossing these cultural borders he compellingly questions western perspectives, showing that they are not as universal as many believe.
2009: Kurt Flasch
When the historian Kurt Flasch reviews classics of philosophy, he takes the reader to a “battlefield of philosophy”, as the jury described it, laying bare the “rules of the game and its dirty tricks”. His work about medieval philosophy is polemic and political, and thus well reflects the tradition of Hannah Arendt.
2008: Victor Zaslavsky
It was in honor of the book “Class Cleansing: The Massacre at Katyn” that the jury presented the Hannah Arendt Award to Victor Zaslavski in 2008. In the book, Zaslavski exposes the cruelties committed by the Russian army in 1940 when they killed and expelled many Polish soldiers and civilians. The jury thus honored the courage to make public what the Russian government wanted to remain forgotten.
2007: Tony Judt
Tony Judt is an author and historian who has never been afraid of stating his point of view in controversial political debates. While remaining skeptical about a united Europe based on a single common identity, he also warned of an inability to act politically within a Europe based on pluralism.
2006: Julia Kristeva
The writer and philosopher Julia Kristeva works and thinks beyond the traditional borders of academic disciplines. Especially by connecting psychoanalytic and political perspectives, she echoes Hannah Arendt by breaking with tradition and provoking public reflection in new directions.
2005: Vaira Vike-Freiberga
Before she became Prime Minister of Latvia, Vaira Vike-Freiberga experienced living under a dictatorship as well as living in exile. In her thank you speech for the award, she again expressed a wish to “build the House of Europe as a common home we can live in together”. The jury honored her in 2005 for her courageous and determined political work and the efforts she put into the integration of Latvia and Eastern Europe into the broader European community.
2004: Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde
The recipient of the Hannah Arendt Award in 2004 was the legal scholar and philosopher Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde. The jury honored Böckenförde for the decisive role he played in debates about constitutional law, and for his contributions to ongoing discussions about secularism, pluralism and religious freedom.
2003: Michael Ignatieff
In 2003, the jury honored the Canadian author, academic and former politician Michael Ignatieff for the outstanding quality of his temporal analyses, which focused primarily on troubled regions of the world. His essays, the jury relayed, seek to connect the understanding of human rights with the political urgencies of our world following the cold war and in consideration of the new responsibilities of the west.