Michael Ignatieff, thinker and essayist, Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences 2024 | Culture | EUROtoday

The Canadian thinker and author Michael Ignatieff, recognized above all for his essays on nationalism, liberalism and human rights, has received the 2024 Princess of Asturias Prize for Social Sciences, as reported this Wednesday by the muse that grants the awards. The 77-year-old mental gave the convention simply yesterday in Madrid Democracy on the polls: when the system turns into the issue, on the Areces Foundation.

A staunch defender of liberalism, Ignatieff has almost half a century of mental exercise, between the lecture rooms of Oxford and Harvard, a number of acknowledged and celebrated essays, journalism or politics within the Canadian Parliament, as a member and candidate of the Liberal Party for nearly a decade. . Some of the latest analyzes of him have centered on the ethical orientation of people, on virtues akin to tolerance and belief, on how nice figures in historical past discovered reduction after moments of disaster or on the dangers confronted by democratic methods. . Among his best-known essays are The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror, Blood and Belonging: Journeys to the New Nationalism (which tells the way it re-emerged strongly on the finish of the twentieth century), The on a regular basis virtues o In search of consolation. A polyglot and nice fan of hockey and baseball, he has additionally printed three works of fiction.

A number of days in the past he advised this newspaper that he’s getting ready a guide in regards to the historic occasions that his era, that of the child boomers. And he additionally believed, relating to the Catalan elections, that Spain must develop a fancy and pluralistic conception of the nation. “On the other hand, I fervently oppose secession, since it is very clear that it would be a violation of the Constitution,” he added. More usually, the mechanisms behind the types of coexistence and battle are thought of one of many essential threads that run by means of all of his work.

Ignatieff was born in 1947 right into a rich household, with an extended custom in diplomacy and intellectuality. His dad and mom' work led him to spend his youth between Canada and most of the essential European capitals. He graduated in History from the University of Toronto, incomes a PhD from Harvard and, after attending the colleges of British Columbia, Oxford and Cambridge, he returned to Harvard to direct the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. In his youth he declared himself an admirer of John F. Kennedy and Pierre Elliott Trudeau (former Prime Minister of Canada and father of the nation's present Prime Minister).

In one other European capital, Budapest, he skilled one of the crucial tough experiences of his profession: between 2016 and 2021 he served as rector of the Central European University, financed by George Soros. The establishment was lastly compelled to maneuver to Vienna, because of the incessant assaults of the Hungarian Government of Viktor Orbán. “It was an atrocious attack on academic freedom,” he advised EL PAÍS days in the past. “The European Union does not have robust means to defend this freedom.”