Born in 1961, he is an English political philosopher and sociologist. Trained in Oxford with intellectuals of the stature of Steven Lukes and Joseph Raz, he currently teaches at the University of Warwick. He has been a visiting professor at numerous institutions, including Harvard, Wisconsin, and MIT universities. A thinker with egalitarian roots, he has developed an extensive work, centered mainly around social justice and the problems related to education.

Along with Stephen Mulhall, in 1992 he published Liberals and Communitarians, an extraordinary essay on the Liberal-Community debate that was translated into multiple languages ​​and earned him international recognition in academia. He is also the author of Family Values: The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships (with Harry Brighouse, 2014), How Not To Be A Hypocrite: School Choice for the Morally Perplexed Parent (2003) and Against the Odds? Social Class and Social Justice in Industrial Societies (with Gordon Marshall and Stephen Roberts, 1997).