Professor David Auerbach, who has on occasion nodded in with extremely knowledgeable comments about walks in Paris, bakeries worth visiting in the Triangle area, and other matters far from his official expertise in the philosophy of mathematics, calls my attention to the fact that Thomas Piketty has just refused the signal French award of the Legion d'Honneur, saying “It isn’t up to the government to decide who’s honorable. They would do better to concentrate on reviving growth.”
You gotta love him!
It calls to mind the fact that Jean Paul Sartre also declined the Legion d'Honneur, as well as the Nobel Prize.
I invite my readers to give us other examples, if they exist, of distinguished intellectuals who have declined official honors and awards. No fair mentioning Kant's decline of a Professorship of Poetry. He just didn't want to leave home.
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Le Duc Tho refused the joint 1973 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to him and Henry Kissinger.
Le accused the U.S. and South Vietnam for violations of the peace treaty.
yeshaayahu leibowitz turned down the israel prize in 1993, and instead gave a talk urging soldiers to refuse to participate in the occupation.
Gustave Courbet, not exactly a distinguished intellectual, but an intellectual and distinguished member of the Paris Commune (elected as a delegate for the 6th arrondissement), refused the Legion of Honor in 1870. Writing in Le Siécle, Courbet declared, "Honor is neither in a title nor a ribbon, it is in the act and the motive for the act. The state is incompetent in the matter of art. I decline the honor that you believed you did me. I am fifty years old and I have always lived as a free man; let me end my days free. When I am dead, they will say of me: that man never belonged to any school, any church, an institution, any academy, above all any regime, if it was not the regime of liberty."
Spectacular! Keep 'em coming!! Now that Magpie mentions it, I have a vague recollection of that, but the other two were totally unknown to me. Pity that Courbet couldn't have been from the 5th. :)
To quote The Guardian
Others who have spurned the honour include the writers Albert Camus, George Sand and Jean-Paul Sartre, the composers Hector Berlioz and Maurice Ravel, and the scientists Pierre and Marie Curie, who dismissed the invitation with the announcement that “In science we are interested in things, not people”.
Pretty good company to keep!
Sinclair Lewis declined the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith. He wrote in part: "[The terms of the Pulitzer for fiction] are that the prize shall be given 'for the American novel published during the year which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.' This phrase, if it means anything whatsoever, would appear to mean that the appraisal of the novels shall be made not according to their actual literary merit but in obedience to whatever code of Good Form may chance to be popular at the moment."
Lewis of course won (and accepted) the Nobel Prize for Literature four years later.
The Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman turned down both the Fields Medal and the one million dollar Clay Millennium Prize.
Robert Shore
Adrienne Rich declined the National Medal for the Arts.
Among the British intelligentsia and cultural celebrities it's practically a competitive sport to turn things down: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declining_a_British_honour
Geneviève Bujold and Glenn Gould refused the Order of Canada.
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