The Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles has announced Martha C. Nussbaum as the winner of the 2018 Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture.

Launched in 2016, the $1 million award honors thinkers whose ideas have profoundly shaped human self-understanding and advancement in a rapidly changing world. Selected from more than five hundred nominees, Nussbaum, one of the world's leading public philosophers, has, over the course of her distinguished career, provided a framework that helps us better understand vulnerability — particularly the emotions in moral and political life — and the conditions for human well-being and happiness. 

This is evident across her oeuvre but particularly in her early works, The Fragility of Goodness and Love's Knowledge. At the same time, her thinking about international development and welfare economics — as explained in Frontiers of Justice, Women and Human Development, and Creating Capabilities — has helped inform and is aligned with the United Nations Human Development Index, which uses a "capabilities approach" that replaces older development concepts (e.g., the importance of boosting incomes) with things like human capacity, life expectancy, and the importance of education — an approach that has shaped contemporary policy and practice in many regions of the globe.

The author of more than twenty books and the editor of twenty-one others, Nussbaum has been widely influential on the topics of emotions with works such as Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of the Emotions and Anger & Forgiveness, as well as our current political moment, as seen in The Monarchy of Fear.

Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, where she is a member of the Law School and Philosophy department and holds associate appointments in the Divinity School and the Political Science and Classics departments. She also is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; a fellow of the British Academy and Academy of Finland; the winner of many prestigious awards, including the Kyoto Prize (2016) and the University of Chicago Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching; and the holder of honorary degrees from sixty colleges and universities in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe.

"Martha C. Nussbaum is rather heroic in the way that she transcends academia. She has taken her transformative and relatable work into public debates about the key questions of national and global political significance. By challenging us to look closely at the capability of humans, as well as our emotions, she has given us strategies for hope and connectivity," said Berggren Institute founder and chair Nicolas Berggruen. "I am delighted the jury has chosen to award a philosopher who opens windows to other disciplines, for this enables us to better understand ourselves and our world."