Martha Nussbaum’s 19971997 book asks how institutions shape intimate life before the law decides what to regulate.

The 2018 Berggruen Prize went to Martha Nussbaum alone, from more than 500 nominees.

The Berggruen Institute’s jury picked her from a shortlist of five for its $1 million Prize for Philosophy and Culture, and conferred it on 10 December 2018 at the New York Public Library. The prize list on the institute’s site gives her name and the year, and no written citation. The closest thing to one is the jury chair’s line in the announcement:

“Few philosophers combine depth and lucidity with elegant and moving prose.”

A correction to the data this story started from: Ernst Freund is not a co-winner. He is the name on her chair at the University of Chicago, where she is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics. See the laureate list.

The book runs from desire to law to family, and its last word is about institutions.

FactIts 17 pieces disagree and share no single finding. The parts move from care, desire and gender (Part I), through sexual liberty and speech (Part II), to economic, constitutional and natural-law readings of homosexuality (Part III), and on to family membership, children and single motherhood (Part IV). Nussbaum’s closing commentary (pp. 319 to 338) opens on institutions, not private feeling: the rules that, in 1997, restricted same-sex lives, including the bar on marriage.

InterpretationRead whole, the collection treats intimate life as already shaped by institutions before any lawmaker asks whether to regulate it.

This reading rests on the publisher’s contents and the accessible openings of three chapters, not the full text.

The announcement names 8 Nussbaum books. This one is not among them.

FactThe jury’s announcement lists eight books, grouped under human vulnerability and the emotions, the capabilities approach to development, and the politics of fear. It does not mention sexuality, marriage or family law.

InterpretationThe prize rewarded a philosopher who carries argument out of the academy. This book is a compact case of that habit: an economic reading (Richard Posner), a constitutional one (Cass Sunstein) and a natural-law one (Paul Weithman) argue in one volume. What the announcement leaves out is that her public reach also runs through law, sexuality and the family.

Three questions this desk brings to a close reading, not the book’s own words: what evidence supports a claim about desire or families; what makes a preference or an institution unjust; and what further step turns that into a law.

By 2022, 741,000 US households were same-sex married couples.

Nearly 1.5 million adults in the United States lived with a spouse of the same sex in 2022, says the Census Bureau. They were younger than spouses in opposite-sex marriages: 20.0 percent were aged 25 to 34, against 12.6 percent, and 14.6 percent were 65 or older, against 25.0. More had a degree: 52.9 percent against 41.2.

Later context, not a test of the book. The survey counts marriages involving the householder, its relationship categories changed in 2019, and its estimates carry sampling error.