Creating global moral iconicity

Abstract

Since at least the late nineteenth century, a world-level moral culture has developed, providing a space for certain persons to be presented as global moral icons. This global moral space was already pointed to by Kant as an emergent form, and was later theorized by Durkheim. This article shows that an important institutionalization of global moral culture involved the founding of the Nobel Prizes, the subsequent mutations of which were also important in the constitution of that culture. These, and other awards which imitated them, are performative in a profound sense: they simultaneously reflect and help bring into being a planet-spanning culture which demands moral icons which both exemplify and partly constitute it. How the Nobel Prizes and their imitators work to create moral iconicity that is globally relevant is explored. The case of Gandhi is taken as an example of how, despite not being awarded a Nobel Prize, some moral icons are also brought into being through symbolic contact with other such icons, including Nobel Prize winners. The article considers the lingering, powerful, but generally invisible, influence today on world moral culture of the innovations pursued by the early Nobel Prize committees.

The sociology of intellectuals in the 20th and 21st century

“…Second, when thinking about intellectual success stirred by performances, sociologists of intellectuals pay relatively little attention to the nature of the cultural phenomena that permeate the world of intellectuals and contribute to their success-for example, gossip and myths or the aesthetic objects and ceremonies devoted to commemorate their lives and entrench particular narrative retellings of their careers. But it is through mythological narrativisations of the canon, aesthetic-material expressions of reverence that iconicity (Bartmanski, 2012;Inglis, 2018) is constructed and represented, and it is through the hearsay and gossip that it radiates through fields and networks.…”