This piece was originally featured on Research Matters.
Nancy Fraser, Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science, has been named a chevalier de la Légion d’honneur — a knight of the Legion of Honor of France.
This honor, the highest reward bestowed by France for outstanding merit, was founded by Napoleon in 1802 and is given to French nationals and others who have served the country or helped further its values. Fraser’s official award letter states, “You develop through your many papers a reflection on the major issues facing our contemporary societies that is as philosophic as it is political. Your original feminist thought aims to understand the inequalities of gender from a triple economic, cultural and political perspective. Through your work, you wish to help change society, and to imagine a new one…. France recognizes the breadth of your work, your commitment to promoting French language and thought as well as your cooperation with French and European universities.”
During her tenure at The New School for Social Research, Fraser has developed a longstanding relationship with the French academy. She served as Blaise Pascal International Research Chair at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales from 2008 to 2010 and as the international research chair in social justice at the Collège d’études mondiales of the Foundation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme from 2011 to 2016.
The Legion of Honor is the latest award Fraser has received for her work. She recently received the Nessim Habif World Prize, conferred at the University of Geneva on October 12, 2018, and the Award for Lifetime Contribution to Critical Scholarship from the Haven Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, conferred there on April 11, 2019.
Fraser has published dozens of books and articles on social and political theory, feminist theory, and contemporary French and German thought. Her latest work is Capitalism: A Conversation in Political Theory, co-authored with Rahel Jaeggi, in which the two thinkers “show how, throughout its history, various regimes of capitalism have relied on a series of institutional separations between economy and polity, production and social reproduction, and human and non-human nature, periodically readjusting the boundaries between these domains in response to crises and upheavals.”
Fraser is leading the Critique of Capitalism seminar at the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry’s 2019 Summer Seminars.