Gaspard Koenig[modifier | modifier le code]

Gaspard Koenig is a philosophy professor and the prize-winning author of a dozen of essays and novels. He is President of the think-tank GenerationLibre, an organization he launched in 2013.

Biography[modifier | modifier le code]

Born in 1982, Gaspard Koenig graduated from Ecole “Normale Supérieure, Lettres et Sciences Humaines” with an advanced teacher’s degree in philosophy studies. He chose Gilles Deleuze’s work as his initial field of research^[1] and took an interest in epistemology. He was introduced to French classical liberal philosophy on a one-year course at Columbia University (New York).

His first professional assignment was as a lecturer in philosophy at the University of “Lille III”. He then spent two years working as a speechwriter for Christine Lagarde, who was Minister of Finance at the time. In 2009, he joined the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in London as a Counsellor in the Strategy Department (focusing inter alia on expanding EBRD activities to Mediterranean countries in the wake of the Arab Spring).

He left the civil service in 2013 to set up the think-tank "GenerationLibre" in Paris.

He carried on his teaching and educational activities, lecturing on the philosophy of Liberalism at Sciences-Po Paris and publishing a newsletter to provide an analysis of news headlines from the perspective of classical philosophers (“Time to Philo”).

He now writes a weekly column at the French daily “Les Echos”. He has also been producing since 2016 a series of long stories for the French weekly “Le Point”, travelling around the world to meet “les aventuriers de la liberté“ (freedom fighters), from Berlin hackers to American libertarians to Rwandan entrepreneurs.

He has been selected as a “Young Leader” in the 2017 class of the French-American Foundation.

The think-tank “GenerationLibre”[modifier | modifier le code]

GenerationLibre advocates a "liberal" approach to both economic and political as well as social issues, setting individual freedoms at the heart of public policies. The think-tank publishes regularly research papers drafted by academics and business professionals on subjectifs such as freedom of speech, self-employment or universal basic income (promoted by GenerationLibre under the LIBER negative income tax approach).

GenerationLibre ideological spectrum goes from left libertarian on social issues to free-market conservative on economic ones.

His concept of liberalism[modifier | modifier le code]

Gaspard Koenig’s personal philosophical research leads him toward more libertarian positions, with self-ownership as a prime tenet of political philosophy. His approach shows some similarities with the American “bleeding-heart libertarian” movement, shifting from a the classical definition of “negative liberty” viewed as a natural right towards the idea of “autonomy” as a social construct. From this perspective, society plays a role in granting the individual the means of his own emancipation, regardless of any collective goal or common values.

Other activities[modifier | modifier le code]

Novelist[modifier | modifier le code]

The first work by Gaspard Koenig to appear in print is a novel, “Octave avait vingt ans” (Grasset, 2004), which was praised from seasoned literary critics Bernard Franck and Patrick Poirot-Delpech and short-listed for the “Prix Goncourt” literary award. Gaspard Koenig has kept publishing novels at a steady rate ever since. The latest of these, “Kidnapping”, is about the life of a Romanian nurse who has left her country to work as a nanny in London.