Laudation for Seyla Benhabib: Introduction to the Adorno Prize Lecture—Frankfurt, September 11, 2024

As a female political philosopher, born in Turkey to a Sephardic Jewish family, educated in America and Germany, and enjoying an illustrious teaching career in the United States, Seyla Benhabib has long pondered the limits placed on the validity of transcendent ideas by their contextual genesis. This “laudatio” for the Adorno Prize she was awarded in 2024 by the city of Frankfurt examines her work, with its special debts to Habermas and Arendt, as an evolving attempt to explore this issue with special reference to the challenges of feminism, postcolonial anti-Eurocentrism, the populist assault on democracy, and the global refugee crisis. Her defense of cosmopolitan ideals against ethnonationalism and abstract universalism shows that transcendent ideas can have particular genetic origins.