Seyla Benhabib awarded the Karl Jaspers Prize for her philosophy and her public voice

The Rights of Others and the paradox it refuses to resolve#

The book the committee would have had before it, if it had only one, is The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens, delivered as the Seeley Lectures at Cambridge in 2002 and published by Cambridge University Press in 2004, when it took the American Political Science Association's Ralph Bunche Award. Its subject is the person who arrives at a border with a claim and no passport that makes the claim good.

Benhabib starts from two texts and a paradox. The texts are Kant's third definitive article in Perpetual Peace, which grants the stranger a right of hospitality but only a right not to be treated with hostility, and Hannah Arendt's observation, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, that the stateless had lost the "right to have rights", the standing that makes every other right enforceable. The paradox is that of democratic legitimacy itself. A democracy claims to act on universal principles, yet it can only act as a bounded people, and the bounding of the people, who is in and who is out, is the one decision the people cannot have made democratically, since there was no people yet to make it. Every liberal democracy therefore lives on a contradiction between its universalist commitments and its particular membership.

Her answer is neither open borders nor sovereign closure. She argues for what she calls porous borders and for a process she names democratic iterations: the repeated, public re-argument of a polity's rules of membership, in courts, legislatures and civic associations, through which the principles of a constitution are re-interpreted by those they were once applied to, including residents who are not yet citizens. Her examples were the French headscarf disputes and the German citizenship cases of the 1990s. The point is that the paradox is not solved but worked, and that the working of it is the democratic activity. Cosmopolitan norms enter a state's law not by fiat from above but by being taken up, quarrelled over and re-stated from within.

Criticism has come from both directions, which is one reason committees find the argument attractive. Theorists of open borders find the concession to state membership too large; defenders of sovereign discretion find the cosmopolitan norms an unelected intrusion. The Skytte citation, with its "deep respect for the rights of both individuals and states", is an exact description of a position that gives neither party what it wants.

From the concrete other to the stateless one#

The migration work grew out of an earlier quarrel, conducted inside the Frankfurt tradition. Benhabib wrote her Yale doctorate in 1977 on Hegel's philosophy of right, published Critique, Norm and Utopia in 1986 on the foundations of critical theory, and in Situating the Self (1992) proposed what she called interactive universalism. Against Habermas's discourse ethics as then formulated, and against Rawls's contractors behind the veil, she argued that a moral point of view built solely on the "generalised other", the abstract bearer of rights, could not do the work claimed for it without also taking the standpoint of the "concrete other", the person with a history, a body and needs one does not share. Habermas himself received the Jaspers Prize in 1995. Their names on the same list is a fair map of what the argument has become.

The Claims of Culture (2002) took the same apparatus to multiculturalism and refused to treat cultures as sealed wholes whose preservation could be a state's task. The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996) remains a standard reading of Arendt; Exile, Statelessness, and Migration (2018) returns to Arendt, Benjamin, Adorno and Isaiah Berlin as thinkers who had themselves been the "others" of her title. The Heidelberg statement singles out her standing in twentieth-century German philosophy alongside the migration work, and the two are not separable. Her theory of the stranger's rights was built by reading philosophers who had been strangers.

The interventions the committee had in mind#

Which public statements the jury meant, it did not say. Two are on the record and both are uncomfortable for somebody.

In November 2023, several hundred philosophers signed the "Philosophy for Palestine" letter, which held that to treat the violence as beginning on 7 October was "a reckless indifference to history". Benhabib published her reply through the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard on 15 November. "I do not endorse this letter and many of the views expressed in it," she wrote. She endorsed the call for an end to the killing and for Palestinian self-determination, and then said the thing the letter had not: "Hamas is a nihilistic organization which treats the civilian population of Gaza as its hostage."

Twenty-two months later, on 16 September 2025, she published "The Gaza War Reconsidered" on the Völkerrechtsblog, with a German version in Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik. The register had changed. Israel under the Netanyahu government, she wrote, "has become a 'rogue state,' defying the laws of war, human rights law as well as humanitarian law," while Hamas "has also committed crimes against humanity through the mutilation and torture of innocent civilians, the abduction of children and the elderly as hostages." The larger diagnosis was of an international order in which "sovereignty has become impunity and equals the power of the strongest to trample the weakest," and in which "no one seems to have the courage, conviction or power to defend the post WWII international regime anymore."

Those are the positions the Heidelberg jury calls "wise and constructive". What the two texts share, and what the Bremen jury of the Arendt Prize also noticed in praising her "independent judgment" in the manner of Arendt's thinking "without a banister", is a refusal to let the description of one atrocity cancel the description of another. That is a discourse-ethical habit before it is a political one: the concrete other on each side has to be given a face.

Benhabib was born in Istanbul in 1950 and educated there and at Brandeis before Yale. She taught at Boston University, Stony Brook, the New School and Harvard before returning to Yale in 2001, and retired in 2020. Readers who want the longer view of her career will find it in our note on her seventy-sixth birthday. Heidelberg will hear her on 29 April 2027, in the city where Jaspers lost his chair and then helped to rebuild the university that had let him lose it.

Michael Sandel, Martha Nussbaum, Plato