I am currently an Assistant Professor (Maître de Conférences) in Politics, Philosophy & Economics (PPE) at ESPOL, Université Catholique de Lille. My work sits at the intersection of political philosophy, normative political economy, and the philosophy of the social sciences, with a focus on liberalism and neoliberalism, institutional design under complexity, and the normative evaluation of market orders and constitutional rules.

Across several projects, I examine how rule-based governance shapes (and sometimes undermines) democracy, social justice, and autonomy, whether through the rise of private authority, the moral limits of social norms, or the promises and pitfalls of polycentric arrangements (federalism, city autonomy, housing rights).

My research is unified by the following question: how should we govern through rules in complex societies, when both markets and democratic politics generate forms of power that are partly opaque, dispersed, and difficult to control? I approach this question by combining (i) analytical political philosophy and normative political economy with (ii) a sustained engagement with the philosophy of social science (especially epistemic limits, spontaneous order, and institutional complexity).

A first line of work reconstructs liberal and neoliberal legal–political thought as a theory of governance by rules (Hayek, Lippmann, Buchanan, Posner), and assesses the standard charge that neoliberalism tends toward authoritarianism. Rather than treating “markets vs. democracy” as a simple opposition, I analyze the institutional conditions under which competitive orders claim legitimacy, and how they relate to public reason, deliberation, and pluralism (including through the work of Gerald Gaus). This line culminates in a book project based on my dissertation, Governing by Rules: Neoliberal Political and Legal Thought (defended in September 2022).

A second line of work develops a normative theory of market orders that takes seriously two pressures often kept apart: (a) the demand that markets be compatible with social justice (in Rawlsian and post-Rawlsian debates), and (b) the concern that markets generate private authority, i.e., power over others that is not straightforwardly accountable through democratic institutions. Here, my aim is not to collapse into either full egalitarianism or laissez-faire, but to articulate what a competitive order must satisfy to be defensible, especially in the light of the possibility of dependency or vulnerability. 

A third line of work examines polycentric governance, federalism, institutional competition, and especially city autonomy, as a response to complexity and deep disagreement. I develop an epistemic and institutional case for polycentricity, while taking the “fairness objection seriously”: the worry that autonomy produces inequality, exclusion, and democratic erosion. This research connects directly to work on housing rights.

Across these strands, my broader contribution is to treat institutional design as a normatively constrained response to complexity: the point is not to idealize either centralized deliberation or decentralized markets, but to specify which rules, rights, and institutional forms can sustain legitimacy when power is partly private, partly public, and persistently contested.