Université catholique de Louvain

Faculty Member, Chaire Hoover d'éthique économique et sociale

Maître de recherche - Senior Research Fellow

About

1. GENERAL:
I am an economist by training. After a solid mainstream education in neoclassical economics at one of Europe's top departments (in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, which hosts the research center CORE as well as a prestigious economics faculty), I opted for a Ph.D. on economic and social justice. My main supervisor was Prof. Philippe Van Parijs, who in 1991 offered me to be the second founding member of the internationally renowned Hoover Chair for Economic and Social Ethics, where I have been doing research ever since. I have been interested in a great variety of topics, all linked to political economy and the ethics and philosophy of economics. This has led me to investigate several fields such as phenomenology, behavioral psychology, political theory, and cultural anthropology. I have come out of this rich experience as a staunch believer in interdisciplinarity.

2. DISTANT PAST:
Between 1997 and 2006, I developed a framework of analysis called "existential economics", based on a simple idea: any economic system is rooted in fundamental human urges, drives, fears, and quest for life's meaning. During that period, I gave a large number of conferences on these topics and published numerous scientific articles as well as four books: "Ethique économique et sociale" (2000), "Trois essais sur l'éthique économique et sociale" (2001), "Critique de l'existence capitaliste: Pour une éthique existentielle de l'économie" (2005), and "L'économie, c'est nous: Pour un savoir citoyen" (2006).

3. RECENT PAST AND PRESENT:
From 2006 to 2010, I built an evolutionary/ developmental model to explain how existential economics could be used to build a transition to new forms of economic life, based more on commons and cooperation. I have given a large number of conferences on these topics and published numerous scientific articles as well as four books: "Critical Political Economy" (2008), "Ethique de l'existence post-capitaliste: Pour un militantisme existentiel" (2009), "Full-Spectrum Economics: Toward an Inclusive and Emancipatory Social Science" (2010), and "L'homme économique et le sens de la vie: Petit traité d'alter-économie" (2011). Over the past few years I have gradually moved more towards applied, policy-related topics that capitalize on my past theoretical research. Currently my research topics are:
- the transition towards a green economy;
- sustainable finance, banking, and investment;
- "greening" European integration;
- monetary reform and complementary currencies;
- sustainable communities and community economic development;
- ecological economics and ecological rationality;
- existential underpinnings of economic life, existential ethics of economics;
- economic agents' critical rationality and complexity theory; and Integral economics.
I also offer conferences and workshops in both academic and non-academic surroundings, such as business firms or NGOs.

4. PRESENT AND FUTURE:
Today, my "pure theory" days are over and for the next decade (2011-2021), my objectives are the following:
1. To go from theoretical to applied, from personal research performance to fostering teamwork and collective and collaborative research
2. To capitalize on my past academic work in order to build research that creates bridges with policy-building and decision-making, in particular in the areas of
(a) the transformation of the European integration project into a genuinely federal structure, combining supranational, national, and regional governance, an original architecture of currencies, and an equilibrium between top-down coordination and bottom-up (competitive) emergence
(b) the transition towards a sustainable (or “green”) economy, which at the European level includes reforms in the area of currency management, trade regulation, and cultural creativity
3. To re-focus my teaching activities around issues linked to the above topics

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