Philippe Van Parijs studied philosophy, economics, law, sociology and linguistics at the Universities of Louvain, Oxford, Bielefeld and California (Berkeley). He holds doctorates in philosophy (Oxford) and the social sciences (Louvain). He is emeritus professor at the University of Louvain (Hoover Chair of Economic and Social Ethics) and special guest professor at the University of Leuven (Higher Institute for Philosophy). He was also a regular visiting professor at Harvard University from 2004 to 2008 and at the University of Oxford from 2011 to 2015, and has been a Robert Schuman Fellow at the European University Institute (Florence) from 2016 onwards.
He is a member of Belgium’s Royal Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the British Academy and doctor honoris causa of Laval University (Québec). He was awarded the Francqui Prize in 2001 and the Ark Prize for Free Speech in 2011. In July 2020, the British magazine Prospect selected him among « the world’s top ten thinkers for the Covid-19 age » because of his role as « the godfather of the basic income movement ».
He chairs the Advisory Board of the Basic Income Earth Network, which he co-founded in 1986, and the Brussels Council for Multilingualism, set up by the government of the Region of Brussels-Capital in 2020. He co-founded in 2009, with economist Paul De Grauwe, the Re-Bel initiative (“Rethinking Belgium’s institutions in the European context”) and has been a columnist with The Brussels Times since 2014.
His books include Evolutionary Explanation in the Social Sciences (Rowman & Littlefield, 1981), Le Modèle économique et ses rivaux (Droz, 1990), Qu’est-ce qu’une société juste? (Seuil, 1991), Marxism Recycled (Cambridge U.P., 1993), Real Freedom for All (Oxford U.P. 1995), What’s Wrong with a Free Lunch? (Beacon Press, 2001), Just Democracy. The Rawls-Machiavelli Programme (ECPR 2011), Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World (Oxford U.P. 2011), After the Storm. How to Save Democracy in Europe (Lannoo 2015, ed. with L. van Middelaar), Basic Income. A radical proposal for a free society and a sane economy (Harvard U.P. 2017, with Y. Vanderborght) and Belgium. Une utopie pour notre temps/ Belgium. Een utopie voor onze tijd (Académie royale de Belgique/ Polis, 2018).
