Alain Touraine and Zygmunt Bauman Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities 2010

Statement by Zygmunt Bauman, on being bestowed with the 2010 Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities:

“I would like to convey to His Royal Highness the Prince of Asturias my deepest gratitude for the trust expressed by the Foundation in the value and significance of my modest contribution to our joint human self-awareness; I can hardly think of an act more rewarding or arriving from an institution of greater moral authority. And it so happens that in the Spanish speaking part of the planet, in Latin America as well as in Europe, I found particularly inquisitive, incisive, creative and critical readers (and, hopefully, users) of my writings”.

Zygmunt Bauman
Leeds (United Kingdom), 27^th May 2010

Statement by Alain Touraine, on being bestowed with the 2010 Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities:

“Fully aware of the prestige of the Prince of Asturias Award, I receive it as recognition of my work, which has been constantly linked to the Spanish-speaking world, from Chile and the Latin American continent as a whole, and even to Spain itself, where I often participate in academic activities. This Award increases all the more my awareness of being a Latin intellectual who has found in the Spanish-speaking world, as in the Italian- and French-speaking worlds, the basic guidelines of my life’s work. My goal has always been to rescue the concept of the subject, though not in a philosophical manner, but rather through direct knowledge of collective movements in which the longing is made manifest to defend ‘their right to have rights’ from ruling groups, as Hannah Arendt so perfectly put it”.

Alain Touraine
Paris, 27^th May 2010