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 Van Parijs 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), 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. He became a chair on the Brussels Council for Multilingualism in 2020. (1995) he argues for both the justice and feasibility of a basic income for every citizen (UBI). 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. In a 2025 interview, Van Parijs stated that artificial intelligence would lead to further wealth and power inequality, which could be counteracted with the implementation of UBI. 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. Francqui Prize, 2001 (as editor, 2004) L'Allocation universelle (2005, with Y. Vanderborght) Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World (2011) Just Democracy. The Rawls-Machiaveli Programme (2011) Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy (2017)

Festschrift in honour of Van Parijs Arguing About Justice: Essays for Philippe Van Parijs (Axel Gosseries & Yannick Vanderborght eds., Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2012) was published on the occasion of his 60th birthday.