A new world ordered
Martha Nussbaum's most recent book, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001), has gotten plenty of its own attention, but an earlier publication may have temporarily stolen the spotlight. In November Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reforming Liberal Education (Harvard, 1997) won the 2001 Grawemeyer Award in education, which carries with it a $200,000 prize, one of the largest in the field.

In Cultivating Humanity, Nussbaum-the Ernst Freund distinguished service professor of law and ethics in philosophy, the Law School, the Divinity School, and the College-supports a liberal education that makes students "citizens of the world," able to think critically while being open to the perspectives of others. Maintaining democratic principles in a multicultural society is difficult, she argues, and universities must offer a liberal education that includes the study of other cultures and ways of thinking so students learn how to question the status quo.

The Grawemeyer is not the first award for Cultivating Humanity, which won the 1998 Frederic W. Ness Book Award of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. The award, however,"will greatly help me in studying how fundamental rights actually get implemented-especially for the disadvantaged-in a variety of countries, a project intimately connected with the internationalist educational agenda of Cultivating Humanity," says Nussbaum, who hopes to found a Center for Comparative Constitutionalism and the Implementation of Constitutional Rights at Chicago. "It will also enhance the education of both law students and graduate students in areas pertaining to international understanding and universal rights."

Nussbaum has degrees from New York and Harvard Universities and received the U of C's Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching in 2001. The 17-year-old Grawemeyer Award is presented annually by the University of Louisville to five scholars representing the performing arts, social sciences, and the humanities.
- C.S.

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