Michael Ignatieff Premio Princesa de Asturias for Social Sciences 2024

Your Majesties,
Your Highnesses,
Distinguished and Illustrious Authorities,
Laureates,
Ladies andv Gentlemen,

When you are honored like this, with a prize presented by the royal house in such awe- inspiring circumstances, your first thought is ‘Do I deserve this?” But the moment that thought crosses your mind, you hear Hamlet exclaiming that if we all got what we deserved, who should escape a whipping?

Best then not to dwell on deserving. Just be grateful, my wife says, and I am. Very. Still, prizes are a reckoning with yourself. You can’t help asking: how does the work stack up? What was I trying to accomplish all these years?

At which point, since I am Isaiah Berlin’s biographer, I find myself recalling his distinction between a hedgehog and a fox.

The fox knows many things The hedgehog knows one big thing

Berlin used this gnomic fragment from an ancient Greek philosopher to make a distinction between 2 types of intellectual and artistic achievement. There is, he wrote,

“a great chasm between those. . .who relate everything to a single central vision. . . and... those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.”

Today the royal house is honoring many kinds of achievement -- artistic, cultural, scientific. Some of my fellow prize-winners are hedgehogs and others are foxes.

So I ask myself, which one am I?

Anyone who has been an essayist, a journalist, a film maker, a professor of history, a biographer, a theorist of human rights, even, heaven forbid, a politician, can’t be anything but a fox.

But there is a third possibility: some foxes envy the steady single-minded tenacity of the hedgehog, together with their ability to curl up in a ball and display their spikes when faced with attackers.

I’m one of those foxes who always wished he could be a hedgehog. So it was gratifying to hear the Asturias jury say of me that “political realism, humanism and liberal idealism. . . comprise his fundamental concern.” This made me feel like a hedgehog, if only for a minute.

Truth is, I cannot honestly say I had a single fundamental concern. Creative work is like climbing in the dark. Most of the time you don’t know where you’re going. Some of the time you don’t know why you’re doing it at all. It’s only at a moment like this, when the clouds break and you stand on a summit, that you begin to understand the path you have taken.

Looking back now, I’d also confess how afraid I sometimes was of my fox’s freedom, how afraid most of us are of freedom, how hard it is to maintain the sovereignty of our own judgement, to see the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be, how truly, we must all struggle to be free men and women in a world saturated with manipulation and lies. Yet to call ourselves free and to actually deserve it is the prize that matters most in a life.

I will not say more. Thank you, Princess, for this great honor. You have made one old fox very happy today.