Philippe Van Parijs

Philippe Van Parijs (born 23 May 1951) is a Belgian political philosopher and political economist, best known as a proponent and main defender of the concept of an unconditional basic income and for the first systematic treatment of linguistic justice.

In 2020, he was listed by Prospect as the eighth-greatest thinker for the COVID-19 era, with the magazine writing, "Today’s young UBI enthusiasts draw on the books and tap the networks of this Belgian polymath, who championed it before it was fashionable. For decades, he has warned that our proclaimed freedoms to start businesses or raise children count for nothing without the real freedom that comes with a basic income".

Early life and education
Born 23 May 1951, Philippe Van Parijs completed high school at Collège du Sacré-Cœur de Ganshoren in Brussels. He studied philosophy, law, political economy, sociology and linguistics at the Université Saint-Louis - Bruxelles in Brussels, at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) in Louvain-la-Neuve, at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven) in Leuven, in Oxford, Bielefeld and California (Berkeley). He holds doctorates in the social sciences (Louvain, 1977) and in philosophy (Oxford, 1980).

Career
He is professor at the Faculty of Economic, Social and Political Sciences of the University of Louvain (UCLouvain), where he directs the Hoover Chair of Economic and Social Ethics since its creation in 1991. He was a visiting professor at Harvard University's Department of Philosophy from 2004 to 2011, and has been a visiting professor at the Higher Institute of Philosophy of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven since 2006, and a senior research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, since 2011.

Van Parijs has held visiting positions at the Universities of Amsterdam, Manchester, Siena, Québec (Montréal), Wisconsin (Madison), Maine (Orono) and Aix-Marseille, the European University Institute (Florence), the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow), the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Beijing), the Catholic Faculties of Kinshasa (Congo), All Souls College (Oxford), Yale University, Sciences Po (Paris), the Catholic University of Uruguay, the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the École Normale Supérieure (Paris).

He is one of the founders of the Basic Income European Network (BIEN), which was founded in 1986, and which became the Basic Income Earth Network in 2004, and he chairs its International Board. He coordinates the Ethical Forum of the University Foundation. He also coordinates the Pavia Group with Kris Deschouwer and, with Paul De Grauwe, the Re-Bel initiative. He is a member of Belgium's Royal Academy of Sciences, Letters and Fine Arts, of the International Institute of Philosophy, and of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts and fellow of the British Academy. In 2001, he was awarded the Francqui Prize, Belgium's most generous scientific prize.

Basic income
In Real Freedom for All: What (if anything) can justify capitalism? (1995) he argues for both the justice and feasibility of a basic income for every citizen. Van Parijs asserts that it promotes the achievement of a real freedom to make choices. For example, he purports that one cannot really choose to stay at home to raise children or start a business if one cannot afford to. As proposed by Van Parijs, such freedom should be feasible through taxing the scarce, valued social good of jobs, as a form of income redistribution.

Linguistic justice
Another part of Van Parijs' work is about linguistic justice. In order to address the injustice arising from the privilege enjoyed by English as a global lingua franca, he discusses a wide range of measures such as a language tax which would be paid by English-speaking countries, a ban on the dubbing of films, and the enforcement of a linguistic territoriality principle that would protect weaker languages.

Political proposals

 * National basic income
 * EU-wide dividend paid by VAT

Honours

 * Ailsa McKay Lecture, 2017
 * Francqui Prize, 2001
 * Permanent member, Institut international de philosophie, 1999.