He is director of the magazine La maleta de Portbou and of the European School of Humanities, president of Grup 62 and member of the Real Academia de las Buenas Letras. He is also a member of the Editorial Board of the newspaper Ara and is a contributor to El País and Cadena Ser. He was director of the Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB) until 2011 and president of the Paris Institute for Research and Innovation until 2014.

He began his journalistic career at Correo Catalán and Tele/Express. He was part of the group of the magazine Por Favor and, together with José Martí Gómez, won the Arco Prize for interviews. Together with Pep Calsamiglia and Pere Lluís Font, he created the collection Textos filosófics (Laia/Edicions 62). 

He was a member of the College of Philosophy of Barcelona and head of culture at La Vanguardia for sixteen years, director of the Institute of Humanities and lecturer in Contemporary Philosophy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). 

His published books include El sentit íntim (1979), Mitològiques (1984), Apologia del present (1989), Después de la pasión política (1999), Contra la indiferencia (2010), La izquierda necesaria (2012) and the textbooks Existential utopía (New York, 2012), Dónde va Europa (Barcelona, 2017), Historia mundial de Cataluña (Barcelona, 2018) and Cataluña-España, ¿qué nos ha pasado? (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2019).

He was awarded the City of Barcelona Prize for International Projection in 2012 and the National Culture Prize of the Government of Catalonia in 2013.