>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC.
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[Silence]

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>> Jane McAuliffe: Dr. Billington, members of Congress, of the diplomatic corps, of the Library's James Madison Council, university colleagues, and distinguished guests, I am Jane McAuliffe, Director of National and International Outreach and immediate past Director of the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress. On behalf of the Library of Congress, it is my pleasure to welcome you to the sixth conferral of the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity. As usual, before we begin, please take a moment to turn off mobile phones or any electronic devices that may interfere with this evening's proceedings. This event is being recorded for placement on the Library's website and is also being simulcast via the Internet. So, a special welcome to those of you who are watching on the Web. 
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The John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity is unique among major international awards in both stature and scope. Endowed by the late John W. Kluge, the prize covers the widest range of scholarly fields -- virtually all of the social sciences and the humanities. It honors intellectuals who, over a sustained period, have studied deeply, pushed the boundaries of contemporary knowledge, and creatively addressed the abiding questions and concerns of humankind. The Kluge Prize celebrates probing scholarship that achieves genuine distinction in the particular field as well as broader influence across the diverse areas of human knowing. The selection process is intensive and extensive. The Librarian of Congress solicits nominations from thousands of individuals and institutions all across the world. The hundreds of names received are then researched and assessed by successive panels of curatorial and academic experts and field specific scholars. This is the 15th year of the Kluge Center, which makes this awarding of the Kluge Prize particularly special. As part of our 15th anniversary celebration, the Librarian of Congress decided that the value of the Kluge Prize to be awarded during this prize cycle would be not one million dollars, but a million and a half dollars. We are deeply grateful to the late John W. Kluge for his generosity in creating the endowment that funds this prize as well as the research of many scholars both senior and junior whom the Kluge Center hosts in spacious quarters just down the hall from here. 
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This is the second award ceremony for which John Kluge himself has not been with us. We mourn his passing, remembering with gratitude how much he has given to America's oldest federal, cultural institution. We're delighted, however, that his son, John Kluge Jr., is able to be with us tonight. In the great hall of this institution that symbolizes the significance of knowledge to our democracy, we also thank the Congress of the United States for creating and sustaining the Library of Congress for 215 years, the world's largest library which today houses more than 160 million items. The U.S. Congress has been the greatest single patron of any library in history. We thank the distinguished members who are with us tonight even at an extraordinarily busy time for them. It is now my great privilege to award the Kluge Prize to our two distinguished laureates. Please let me begin by presenting the citation for Dr. Jurgen Habermas. Jurgen Habermas stands as the most important European philosopher and theorist of our recent generations. He has combined the roles of social philosopher and public intellectual to the benefit of his nation and the entire European community. In a succession of influential books, articles, and lectures which have been translated into languages across the globe, Jurgen Habermas has sustained the enlightenment value of open discourse operating within a public sphere of freedom and equity and has built an important bridge between the continental and Anglo-American philosophical traditions. His theory of communicative action situates critical reflection and human freedom within a social dimension, insisting that moral autonomy can be realized only in a just and emancipated society. To the evolution of such a society, Jurgen Habermas has dedicated his own public efforts and actions. His penetrating analyses and persuasive arguments have informed important debates on the major European issues of the last five decades. In the 1980s, he rejected revisionist attempts to justify Nazi socialism and to underplay the horrors of the Holocaust. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Germany, he promoted the creation of the European Union in the face of resurgent nationalisms. For Jurgen Habermas, global human rights abuses argue for systems and structures that transcend the sovereignty of nation-states and require a post-national constellation of global laws and alliances. In recent years, the ever-increasing religious diversity of Europe and the rekindling of religious conflict across the globe have prompted him to reevaluate the assumptions of post-Enlightenment secularism and the role of religion in the contemporary age. Dr. Habermas, will you please come forward to receive the Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity?
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[ Applause ]

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>>Jurgen Habermas:  Thank you very much for your many kind [?]. Mr. Billington, Ladies and Gentlemen, dear colleagues, let me briefly explain the ambivalent feeling of gratitude that I experience on accepting this extraordinary academic award. It is the first American prize that I get and I'm the first German awardee.  This reminds me of the large number of impressive scholars who were driven out of Nazi Germany and who were afforded the opportunity by this country's universities to continue their work and to pass it on to very productive students, some of whom have achieved worldwide renown. ^M00:09:56
Among the illustrious circle of German emigres, let me mention at least a handful of eminent philosophers as representative for many other disciplines: Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Rudolf Carnap, Hans Jonas, Aaron Gurvitch, Carl-Gustav Hempel, Max Horkheimer, Karl Lowith, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Strauss, and Hans Reichenbach. I had the good fortune to study with some of them and I have learned from all of them. Their achievements far overshadow those for which I am to be honored tonight. Now, James Billington's kind suggestion to me briefly to discuss my present work here is too tempting to resist. I'm sorry to [?] you with some rather [?] If we are to arrive at the correct secular self-understanding of modern Western philosophy, my suggestion is to take our orientation not only from Aristotle and Plato, from our scientific origins but also from those specific insights that Western philosophy is gleaned from the Judeo-Christian tradition. 
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I am [?] interested in the history of faith and knowledge from this point of view.  From what one side of philosophy [?] from the other side. Christianity is a late arrival among the major religious and metaphysical worldviews which include Judaism and Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism and Platonism. The founders of these teachings came about roughly at the same time basically 500 or around 500 before Christ. As a result, Pauline Christianity was exposed from the outset to a twofold pressure of reflection. It not only had to clarify its relationship to Judaism and the Hebrew Bible, but also its relation to the Platonism of the educated classes of the Roman Empire. The Church Fathers, who [pause] embraced the legacy of Mosaic monotheism, had to come to terms at the same time with a highly differentiated worldview that was constructed in a completely different way. Nomos and Cosmos took the place of God [?] also emerged into two competing routes to salvation. Early Christian Platonism had to balance the tension between a mode of communication with God and a contemplative ascent to the Ideas. 
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In the beginning, philosophical language was tailored to the ontological representation of the encompassing Cosmos, not to the fateful irruption of a transcendent power in history. The contemplative mode of access of the wise man to the Absolute implies a different epistemic attitude from the communicative mode of access of the believer to the divine Logos. The former encounters the absolute One and All, in the objectifying attitude of a third person. What the believer encounters in the performative attitude of a participant in communication is not primarily the world. Instead his encounters I the first person meets the Word of a second person, of course. Here I am interested in the purely methodological gain of this shift in perspective. In the encounter with Christianity, philosophy learns to take domains of experience seriously that first have to be disclosed performatively, through participation in a practice, before they can then be made into an object of investigation. In contrast to the contemplative route of the wise man, the communicative path to salvation by participating in a ritual practice opens up the historical universe of a world-wide community of believers. Now, this difference in attitudes and experience inaugurates a long discussion about faith and knowledge that extends from Augustine through Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and Martin Luther up to Kant, Hegel, and American Transcendentalism. [pause] 
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My thesis is briefly the following: In the course of this lengthy process, an osmotic transformation of images and narratives of biblical origin into metaphysical concepts took place and thus profoundly changed philosophy itself. Now, in the present context, I can obviously only mention briefly three exemplary results of this long discussion about faith and knowledge. First, the philosophical assimilation of the Christian sense of sin led in the Augustinian tradition to a concept of the will that, in contrast to natural inclinations, does not strive for attractive goods but instead decides between normative alternatives. Second, the break with the Aristotelan conception of nature in High Scholasticism was also triggered by religious experience of contingencies; different from [?] experiences, resulting nominalist ontology of ordered random events first paved the way for the modern natural sciences. Finally, the conception of an all-powerful voluntarist Deity developed from Duns Scotus to Luther led to the development of concepts of subjectivity, freedom, and individuality that became the foundations of the modern concept of autonomy. 
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Kant expressed these motifs of thought in a rather sober post-metaphysical style. Nevertheless, he still wanted to answer the old metaphysical questions: "What do I know?" "What should I do?" "What may I hope?" and, finally, "What is man?" Originally, the great metaphysical systems and world religions had described the place of human beings within the Cosmos or their position in relation to God with a view to the telos of a liberating, a redemptive form of justice. Thus the path to salvation of one or the other form, had provided the authoritative perspective from which then the other major questions of humanity could be resolved of a piece, as it were. However, the mass of accumulating knowledge about the world and [?] knowledge, could be integrated with that sacred knowledge  in the same theoretical language only as long as the different aspects of being, of the good, and the beautiful remained intertwined in fundamental concepts such as "Cosmos" or "God," "Nirvana," "Yin and Yang", "Logos" and [?] As can be seen from Kant's careful analytical differentiation of the four major questions, this logical connection has dissolved in modern thought. Kant dispensed basic religious and metaphysical concepts as you know. As a result, the conceptual link, which until then had facilitated a logically inconspicuous transition from descriptive to evaluative and normative statements, was now missing. At the same time, the question "What can we hope?" lost the superordinate status. Kant placed it on an equal footing with the other questions. Epistemology provides a satisfying answer to the first question concerning proper knowledge of the world. Moral philosophy is responsible for the second question of what justice demands. And the empirical discipline of anthropology is able to answer the question of the nature of man. By contrast the philosophy of religion explain why philosophy is no longer in a position to declare one and only one exemplary route to salvation to be binding. All man can hope for is that, by leading a moral life, one at least proves worthy of the happiness that one seeks but cannot claim to deserve. This thin rational faith is the conclusion that Kant derives from Luther's definitive decoupling of faith from knowledge. But within the framework of this secularized philosophical thinking, Kant still secures a place for religion in the modern world - not unlike Charles Taylor who, in his major work on A Secular Age, defends religious faith under different premises of course as one of several reasonable options. We can say that Kant, could no longer combine the understanding of oneself seamlessly with an encompassing view of the world as a whole.  Nevertheless he did not renounce the commitment of philosophy to clarify our understanding of self and the world. But he paid a price for that by shielding the a priori knowledge of philosophy against objections raised in the light of what we know and come to know about the world. This brings me now to the final episode in my story. The isolation of the "buffered self" of transcendental philosophy from empirical knowledge has not withstood the powerful movements of the detranscendentalization of the mind. With the rise of the humanities and the social sciences at the turn of the nineteenth century, a new continent of history, culture, and society was opened up for philosophical reflection. Hamann, Humboldt, Hegel, Schleiermacher discovered that the achievements of our minds. 
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Excuse me, [?] These people discovered that any achievements of our minds are very much reflected in the cultural forms of what [?] called the "objective mind" as the minds of subjects are shaped in turn by those inner subjectively shared symbolic and historical realities of culture and society. In the wake of the pragmatist, historicist, and linguistic turns, the transcendental subject has been stripped of the armor of a priori knowledge. The eyes of detranscendentalized reason have been gradually opened for what it also can learn about itself from the world. Now that all of its assertions have become fallible, philosophical self-reflection also has to take into consideration advances of both science and the humanities. What does this mean for the commitment that philosophy shared with religion and shares with religion until now? In what ways can it still contribute to clarifying a joint understanding of ourselves and how the world [?] together? Nowadays the kind of post-metaphysical thinking inspired by Hegel, Marx and pragmatism is confronted with a "scientific philosophy" for which only strictly scientific propositions are ultimately capable of truth and falsity. It wishes to answer Kant's question "What is man?" exclusively in terms of natural science. However, cognition and self-cognition are not the same thing. A scientifically enlightened self-understanding means that we recognize and re-identify ourselves under improved, empirically improved descriptions. Advances in empirical knowledge about us as objects should not be confused with the kind of decentering of our understanding of ourselves and the world that is triggered by new scientific knowledge. Scientific statements lend themselves to a critical examination of errors about the world that can lead to an enlightened decentering of an understanding of ourselves in the world, but not to its substitution by natural science. ^M00:30:48
Scientism denies a presupposition that it at the same time, makes at the performative level - I mean the reference to ourselves as socialized subjects who, insofar as we relate to something in the world, always find ourselves already situated within the horizon of a lifeworld. Of course, philosophy can explain this self-reference as well only insofar as it grasps the general structures of the lifeworld in the light of what the human sciences teach us. Unlike myths and religions, post-metaphysical thinking no longer has the power to generate worldviews. It navigates between religious traditions and secular views, between natural and human sciences, law, literature and art, in an attempt to eliminate illusions from our self-understanding, and in the process also to explore its own limits. Nowadays, philosophy, is a,  if I may say, parasitic undertaking that lives off learning processes in other spheres. But precisely in its secondary role as a form of reflection that refers to other already existing cultural achievements, philosophy can render what is known and half-known in a society transparent in its interconnections and thus, expose it to critical scrutiny. This is what originally was meant by a clinical [?] of society.  Thank you very much.
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[applause]
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>> Jane McAuliffe: Thank you very much, Dr. Habermas. I would now like to present the citation for Dr. Charles Taylor. Charles Taylor's eminence as the foremost philosopher in North America echoes the impact that his thought has had across the globe. While Anglo-American linguistic analysts formed the foundation of his academic training, he soon expanded his scope to integrate continental thinkers such as Hegel, whom he reintroduced to the Anglophone philosophical world. His bridging of these two major philosophical traditions complements that of his co-laureate, both of whom advocate an incisive and inclusive philosophical discourse. Charles Taylor is a genuine humanist whose intellectual depth is matched by an unparalleled breadth. He can speak the technical language of metaphysics, but also offer cogent reflections on the major concerns of contemporary life and culture. His command of the interpretive social sciences has made his work required reading far beyond the confines of academic departments of philosophy. His writings are noted for their precision and clarity, qualities that have assured their accessibility to the non-specialist reader. This communicative capacity has guaranteed the expanding influence of Taylor's major themes -- the proper understanding of the human, expression as a modality of freedom and recognition as necessary for its realization, the relation between the natural sciences and the humanities, and the overarching question of, under what social conditions and under what metaphysical and theological assumptions can we hope that human beings will live satisfying and meaningful lives? In challenging the dominant narrative of secularism, Charles Taylor has reasserted the importance of the transcendent as a necessary philosophical foundation for both a full understanding of the self and a grounding of our deepest social values. This key affirmation then allows him to address matters of multiculturalism and of religious pluralism with a nuanced understanding of the richness and variety available within the world's religious traditions. Dr. Taylor, will you please come forward to receive the Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity?
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[ Applause ]
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>> Charles Taylor: Thank you very much for those very kind words. I'm going to lift this. I hope it's going to make it easier to communicate. And I have to say, I'm extremely honored, a little bit awestruck, a little bit overwhelmed, and I would also say very, very grateful for the recognition that this prize accords me. And I would say more for the recognition from the Kluge Center and from the whole, the work that this center has done under the inspiration of Dr. Billington to give some heart and body to the humanities, humanities and social sciences, which I consider to be very closely linked together. And let's face it, in the university today, we're very often beleaguered. I won't say endangered species. We don't want to go and exaggerate too much, but we're very often find ourselves in a, in, we're narrower and narrower confines. And that's why an initiative like this center has been so important. And I hope there will be more that will allow us to have, allow the humanities and social science to have some kind of space to breathe and develop outside universities as well as inside. So for all those reasons, I'm very moved and a little bit overwhelmed, as I say, but let me try to talk a little bit tonight about something that has been bothering me, worrying me, I've been very concerned with about democracy. It's a kind of paradox of our modern democracy. In a sense, our modern liberal, we say, democracy, unlike ancient democracy, is really universalist. It is meant to include everyone. It doesn't have a picture of the citizen body, which is an elite group, but is meant to be all-inclusive. The paradox is that this very social form or this underlying self-understanding very often produces exclusion and produces reasons for excluding certain parts of the population, considering them to be less fully citizens than others. This is the paradox. The paradox of potential self-defeat by the form that we all live in and that we all believe in, our modern democracy. And I'd like to try to give an account. I'll never get this right. This is always very difficult, but some attempt to account for why this happens, what the mechanism is, and so how we can, as it were, undermine this mechanism or overcome it. Well, I think you could understand it in the following terms. Actually, modern democracy, but not only modern democracy. Ancient democracy, too, requires a very strong sense of bonding among the citizens. And, you know, I didn't invent this. This is what Aristotle talks about. This is what it talked about in the whole tradition, [?], so, and Rousseau and so on. We can go on and on. This is an absolutely key insight. But let's see why this has to be so, why this sense of common bonding has to be there. I think you really can see three reasons. I mean, first of all, as it's been commented on by all the great philosophers in the history of political theory, you need a motivation for people to do their duty, to pay their taxes, even sometimes fight in wars or to do what they need to do to keep the society going, to participate without being forced to by some superior authority which you have in other kinds of authoritarian societies. This has to come from people because they can't be, by definition in this kind of society, they can't be simply ordered to do it. So it's that sense of bonding that is where underlies people's willingness to do what they have to do to keep the society going. And secondly, democracies are also sites of very widespread, common deliberation. We're deliberating together all the time. And at some times, coming up to important decision points of elections, but we're deliberating together about the common good, about what we should we do, what legislation we should pass. And common deliberation requires trust. If we are talking together, I have to feel confident that you are talking about the common good, including me, and you have to feel that I am talking about the common good in a way that includes you. And we see how the absence of this in certain societies when, for instance, you have independence movements, separatist movements. We're very familiar with that where I come from. But which arise because certain part of the population feels, well, the others are not really thinking of us. Not really thinking of our interest when they talk about the common good. And it's that distrust which can tear a democratic society apart. 
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And thirdly, they need this common bonding because societies require very often solidarity. When some people are in real trouble, the rest of us will want to help. And there has to be a motivation of that. And that motivation comes from this bonding. Now, all right, so far, so good. Why does this bonding, why is it sometimes a danger? Why can it produce the drive to exclusion? Well, I think, let's look at this more closely. What are the, what's the nature of the bond that we have in a modern democracy? And I think it has two levels. In our modern democracies, of course, a very important part of the bonding is our common commitment to a certain political ethic, to the ethic of democracy itself, the ethic of human rights, the ethic of equality and nondiscrimination. The kind of things that we find in shrine and charters, the great amendments to the, First Amendments to the American Constitution or in our charter and so on. But even when they aren't defined in charters, they are very much part of the heart and soul of these democracies. But there's another dimension to any democracy. I mean, we're not only all in favor of democracy in general. We all have a commitment to our particular historical project of realizing democracy. Be it the American Republic or Canadian Federation or France or Germany and so on. And this, I think I want to borrow one of the I think key terms that Jurgen Habermas coined are, patriotism is constitutional patriotism. That is, it's, we're patriotic as we're proud of our society because it has this basic ethic, has these basic principles. But we have this particular attachment to our historical project. Obviously, I, as all of you, we want to see liberal democracy succeed everywhere in our, we rejoice when there is some color revolution that brings a new democracy into being. We were excited by the hour of spring with the hopes, which had not all been, of course, met, but that there would be this growth of a new democracy. But we have a particular relationship to our democracy. Let's put it this way -- there's a certain pride in our ability to realize it. And I have to add, a certain shame when we fall short of it. It's a particularly strong feeling today, I have to admit. So that's the relationship of a patriot, right? If we are attached to these principles in general, but we have a very powerful attachment to our particular realization. Now, so we had these two aspects of our let's call it political identity, our sense of what we share. There's an ethical aspect and a particular aspect, you know, that is this history, this language, maybe this people, ethnic origin, and so on, which is undertaking this project. Now, how can that, something as admirable as that, generate exclusion? Well, because it's possible to take these definitions, these political identities, and to read them in ways which make it look as though some people are not really citizens in the full sense or don't really deserve to be citizens. Now, this is obviously the case in a democracy which is really mainly based on a kind of ethnic identity because then if people come in from outside not sharing that ethnic identity, it's very easy to have this kind of sense arising that they are not really full citizens. And this is something since the very beginning of modern nationalism two centuries ago, this is something that has recurrently occurred. But it's also possible to have a reading of the ethic of our democracy which paints certain people in a light in which they don't really live up to it. And you have this kind of thing occurs from time to time where, I mean, very often it's the well-off who think that the people who are less successful are somehow not really working. They're not really industrious, they're, it's sort of their fault and so on. And you get the sense of what you have to be in order to be a member of this democracy, that these people are not really living up to what it requires. In these two ways, both on the, if you like, the ethic level, on the ethical level, you can get a reading of the common identity, which seems to paint a certain group as not really being, living up to the conditions. Or thirdly, and this is what we're really dealing with today, you can get a situation in which what is really a reaction of the ethnic unease, unease to do with culture, which is rationalized in terms of an ethical principle. And here I speak from very direct experience, I want to mention a case that we had in Quebec recently where the arrival of people with religions that were rather strange in our history, particularly Muslims, triggered off a reaction in which in the name of the general principle of secularism, we use the word, laicite, but, and it's not an exact translation of secularism, but it sort of does the same job in our society. The idea of a neutral state. The idea of a separation of church and state and so on. These people that were arriving as new arrivals who provoked a kind of cultural discomfort which then got rationalized in a conception of secularism, of laicite, which would involve very much discrimination against them. And particularly that certain jobs would not be open to them if they were wearing clothes, for instance, which reflected their faith, which would, you know, it could be Jews wearing kippah. It could be Sikhs wearing a turban, or, of course, in the most common case, it would be Muslim women wearing the hijab. And this is a kind of case which you see unfortunately repeated again and again. And I want to broaden it a little bit. You know, we discuss laicite in Quebec, and when we do so, we do it in the French language and we share that language with France. And this discussion between different concepts of laicite, actually, it was completely transatlantic. I mean, the ideas are taken over from France, and then some of them are exported back into France. So this is something that is much more general and, as a matter of fact, affects many European countries, but I think you can see the mechanism here that what is really a very strong cultural discomfort in regard to certain people from outside.  The, as it were, rejection of that is rationalized in terms of they're not living up to a certain fundamental principle of the society. And then with a very good conscience, people can pass legislation, which is really discriminatory legislation, and as such, I mean, and as it were, means that people believing certain things -- believing that they have to wear certain clothes, for instance -- could deprive them of rights that other citizens have. And now you can see that I'm talking about something that is a problem in many Western European countries, not just France, but others, as I speak. It's one of the really big problems. What we have here is, if you like, let me use a medical analogy in a certain sense. The immune system of democracy -- what is that? Well, here, the immune system of the democracy is our commitment to that ethic, that common ethic, right? That's what keeps us as citizens doing what we ought to do to sustain a society with this ethic. When you get the ethic redefined in that way, it's as though our immune system is working against us as we're kind of autoimmune. As a democracy, as it were, we're suffering from an autoimmune disease. We are killing our democracy in the name of the ethic of this democracy. And this is the kind of danger which happens over and over again. 
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Now, how do you get over this? Well, what's interesting is that here I'm speaking to Americans. I'm speaking about an experience that is in the broadest sense American. You know, we on this side of the Atlantic, many of us are series of societies that have been taking in immigrants for a long, long time, right? So we have a long history of that. You do, we do, Brazilians do, Argentines do, and so on. And if you look to this history, you can see that all of us have passed through periods when we were doing exactly this. That is, rationalizing our rejection of people who are different on these kind of grounds. You know, you think of the reaction in the 1840s in this country to the Irish immigrants. You think of our reaction and terrible reaction to East Asian immigrants in a not too distant past. And that's, and so we can go on and on. Now, we've grown out of that in these particular cases, right? And it's great that we have. But what we see here is what did it mean to grow out of that? Well, it meant to redefine what it is to be a Canadian, American, and so on. We define in a way which could include these newly arrived people as citizens, [?], we say in French, entire citizens. And this is something which has happened over a great period of time, but as we look back, we can see that this is possible. The only problem is that today, as our societies, all our societies are faced with new ways of immigration with people from new areas, we recognize that there's no such thing as getting over this problem once and for all, and it's possible to be tremendously successful in having coped with and absorbed and got rid of previous modes of exclusion. And yet, when a new situation arises, that, we can still find ourselves moving in the same way, using the same excuses. So what we really have to recognize is that it's an actually endless task, but a very important task, always to undo, overcome, these reactions of exclusion. Only, we have to do it faster. We can look back now on how terrible it was even up until the Second World War and the way we treated our East Asian immigrants. We can look at the way we treated our Aboriginal fellow citizens. We can, and we can look back on that and take a certain satisfaction from that. But it took an awfully long time. And we haven't got the luxury to think of spending that much time learning to live together, for instance, in certain cases with our Muslim fellow citizens. It has to be done much more quickly. So you have here a real agenda for us in the Western world, which really involves two kinds of rethinking. One is the rethinking of what it means to be Canadian and American, a Frenchman, and so on. The redefinition. And the recognition that we're always in the business of doing this. It's the arguments that we've had in Quebec about this and discussion with some of my European friends. It's that we have to recognize that even if there are no immigrants, our children are very different from us and we have to learn to redefine what it is to be a member of our society in face of what our children are introducing and our grandchildren. So it shouldn't be something that we should take amiss or as some kind of abnormality, but we have to be ready to make that kind of reassessment all the time. And the second thing we have to be ready to do is to clarify and unmask these false modes of moralization, right? And that's where we get back to what I was saying at the beginning. The debate we've been involved in in Quebec, we're involved in with our French colleagues. This is an extremely important debate -- redefining seculars, redefining laicite. We talk about open seculars and open laicite and the closed variety. And that kind of debate is absolutely crucial. We have to get it right and we have to keep it right. And you've been a great inspiration. You, I'm talking to Americans now. You've been a great inspiration because you pioneered this idea of society which is open to people of all different religions and you took, but like the rest of us, you took a while to apply that properly and, you know, fully, right? And I read the newspaper about the contest for the Republican nomination with a certain malaise, people saying that maybe Muslims don't fit with the U.S. Constitution. These things come up again and again and again. And they have to, again and again, they have to be refused decisively. So we have, all of us, we have a great agenda on our hands here, but the important thing is to see how democracy can become a danger to itself. And if we can see that, we can I hope deal with it. Well, thank you very much for attention.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Jane McAuliffe: To conclude our ceremony tonight, the Kluge Center and the Library of Congress wish to pay special tribute to the Librarian of Congress, Dr. James H. Billington.
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 [ Applause ]
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Wow. As you are no doubt aware, tomorrow is the last day of Dr. Billington's remarkable 28-year tenure in this position. When James Billington was sworn in as the 13th Librarian of Congress on September 14th, 1987, he was already an esteemed historian and author, a Rhode scholar, a U.S. Army veteran, a professor, and Director of the Woodrow Wilson Center. Under his extraordinary leadership, the Library of Congress has preserved America's founding documents and rich national patrimony while simultaneously building its global collections to represent diverse nations and cultures in 470 languages. He has initiated intellectual and educational programming that has touched millions the world over and expanded the Library's worldwide reach through the innovative delivery of collections, research, and information via the World Wide Web. He has been a visionary, a leader, and a champion for the values embodied in this venerable institution. Namely, the value of deeply researched, deeply reasoned, evidence-based research, the necessity for dispassionate perspectives to address global challenges, and an enduring appreciation for the diversity of cultures, languages, and heritages around the world. Thank you, Dr. Billington, for your leadership in making the Kluge Prize, the Kluge Center, and the entire Library of Congress a vital part of America's cultural and intellectual life. Thank you.
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 [ Applause ]
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>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc dot gov.