Juan Luis Vives

Born in 1492 in Valencia into a family of converted jews, Juan Luis Vives left Spain to study at the Sorbonne.  Sickened by Parisian philosophy and unwilling to return to his country, where his family was persecuted by the Inquisition, he arrived in Louvain in 1519, three years after Thomas More's Utopia hadbeen published there, and taught at Louvain University for many years.  He also stayed more briefly in Oxford, but lived above all in Bruges, one of the world's most active harbours at the time, where he died in 1540.  A stone from his Louvain house was incorporated into a wall of the "Universiteitshalle", which now houses the rectorate of the KULeuven, and his statue adorns a canal bank in Bruges.

A friend and protégé of Erasmus and More, Vives was one of the most eminent representatives of the great humanist generation.  His writings include a critique of decadent scholastic thought, a plea to extend education to girls and a treaty on how to achieve lasting peace in Europe.  As the, author of De Subventione Pauperum, which he published in 1526 and dedicated the mayor and aldermen of Bruges, he can also be considered the first great thinker of the Welfare State.

In this work, published for the first time in Dutch in 1533 (by the municipality of Ypres), in French in 1943 (by De Valero & Fils) and in English in 1999 (by Toronto University Press), he makes a case, both "ethical" and "economic", for the the municipal authorities taking charge of social assistance to the poor, as job that had hitherto been regarded the sole responsibility of private charity.  For Vives, the public assistance thus instituted would continue to proceed from the Judeo-Christian obligation of charity and would only be funded by freely given alms.  But he argued that it would be far more effective than private assistance, because it could be better targeted - all the needy and they alone - and easily be combined with a legitimate work requirement to work in return.

It is after Vives that, in 1995, that the UCL's Faculty of Economic, Social and Political Sciences officially named the meeting room of the Chaire Hoover d'éthique économique et sociale. As a Louvain professor whose origins and contacts meant that he was resolutely open to the outside world, as a philosopher concerned by real-life economic, social and political issues, as an apostle of toleration and solidarity, as the first author to have developed precise arguments in favour of a form of guaranteed income, it would be difficult to imagine a better model for a Chair of Economic and Social Ethics whose inaugural event gave occasion to a book titled Neither Ghetto nor Ivory Tower (1993) and whose activities have partly revolved around a radical contemporary version of a minimum income proposal : a universal basic income.