The competition that made Rousseau famous is now worth fifty thousand dollars

In 1750 the Academy of Dijon announced a competition, and the question was this: has the restoration of the sciences and the arts contributed to the purification of morals?

The winning entry came from a thirty-eight-year-old copyist of music whom nobody had heard of: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts.

Rousseau's answer was no — and that no altered the direction of European thought.

Two hundred and seventy-six years later, the story is the inspiration behind a prize.

The competition#

The Berggruen Prize Essay Competition is run annually by the Berggruen Institute. It offers $50,000 for essays written in English and a further $50,000 for essays written in Chinese.

Winners are announced at an annual ceremony and the winning essays are published — in the institute's phrase, to give readers insight into the perspectives of both East and West.

Entries for the 2026 competition have closed; the results are awaited.

The competition complements the institute's million-dollar Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture. That prize recognises a lifetime's achievement for ideas that have shaped the world; this competition sets out to provoke new thinking.

The most unusual condition#

One sentence in the call for entries separates the competition from academic prizes:

"We are not looking for peer-reviewed scholarship."

What is wanted is set out plainly: essays in the tradition of Rousseau, Montaigne and Emerson. Pieces that offer new ideas and argue for them persuasively, for intellectually serious readers.

This is the exact reverse of what contemporary academic publishing demands.

The refereed article rewards attachment to an existing literature and the narrowest possible claim. The essay asks for the opposite: a wide question, a personal voice, and the nerve to vault over the boundaries between fields.

The pieces offered as models#

The competition supplies a list of "the kind and the manner we are looking for". The list is a reading programme in itself.

Harry Frankfurt, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person" (1971) — the founding text of the modern debate on free will, which established the distinction between first- and second-order desires.

Thomas Nagel, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974) — the most cited paper in the philosophy of consciousness, and the point of departure for the entire argument about artificial consciousness that we have been following this week.

Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation" (1966).

Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History?" (1989) and Samuel Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" (1993).

And among the recent examples: Anil Seth, "The Mythology of Conscious AI" (Noema, 2025).

The Anil Seth connection#

That last name runs straight into this column's agenda over the past week.

Anil Seth was one of the winners of the 2025 Berggruen essay prize, alongside Xin Huang and Xiaoben Liu.

Seth, of the centre for consciousness research at Sussex, represented the strongest position ranged against Chalmers in our piece on Chalmers this week: consciousness cannot be reduced to abstract information processing, and the brain's relations to body, metabolism and environment may well be decisive.

The title of his prize-winning essay declares as much: "The Mythology of Conscious AI."

In the space of a single week we have come across Seth in three separate places: as a speaker at the Chalmers conference in Bochum, as a signatory to the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, and now as a prizewinner here.

For anyone who wants to see who is carrying an argument, it is a good example.

An advisory board with genuine plurality#

The competition's advisory board runs to nearly fifty people, and its composition is worth noting.

Among the Western names are Ned Block, Ruth Chang, Huw Price, Julian Baggini, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Mathias Risse, Arjun Appadurai, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Pankaj Mishra.

But close to half the list is made up of Chinese academics: Tongdong Bai, Chunsong Gan, Chuang Liu, Xiangchen Sun, Tianyue Wu, Tingyang Zhao and others. There are also Vladimir Safatle and Lucas Angioni from Brazil, Rajeev Bhargava and Smita Sirker from India, Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem and Samantha Vice from South Africa, Thierry Ngosso from Cameroon and Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir from Iceland.

This amounts to an institutional answer to the criticism levelled at the Philosopher's Annual selection we covered this week — that the list contained not a single paper written in a language other than English.

And setting aside a separate pool of prize money for Chinese means something more than inviting people to enter in translation: it means treating the language itself as an equal.

What it means for Turkey#

Three practical notes.

First: the competition sets no requirement of an academic post or a title. Like the Sanders Prizes and the National Symposium on Islamic Philosophy that we covered this week, it is one of the channels open to independent researchers.

Second: the form being asked for — the essay — is no stranger to the Turkish tradition of thought. Oruç Aruoba, whom this column covered this week, wrote in precisely that form.

Third: the decision to reserve a separate prize for Chinese is, in the long run, a model. A language becomes visible in the philosophical world when texts written in it are assessed in a category of their own.

And the real point#

What Rousseau did in 1750 was not to contribute to a literature. It was to object, head-on, to the most widely held conviction of his age: that progress had improved mankind.

That is what the Berggruen competition is after too: not an addition to a field, but an objection to a conviction.

The way philosophy journals work today makes this all but impossible. That a prize should be trying to compensate is a sign that the discipline has noticed what it lacks.

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The conditions of entry and the calendar for the coming round are published at berggruen.org.