Etienne Balibar was born in 1942. He graduated at the Sorbonne in Paris, later took his Ph.D. from the University of Nijmegen (Netherlands). He is now Emeritus Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at the University of Paris 10 Nanterre and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He is author of Reading Capital (with Louis Althusser) (1965), Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (Verso, 1991, with Immanuel Wallerstein), Masses, Classes, Ideas (Routledge, 1994), The Philosophy of Marx (Verso 1995), Spinoza and Politics (Verso 1998), Politics and the Other Scene (Verso, 2002), and We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton, 2004).

Part of the Why War? Seminar Series.