Pierre Bouretz is a philosopher and director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He is a specialist in the philosophical history of philosophy. After studying philosophy at Lille University, he graduated from the Paris Institut d’Études Politiques in 1983, where Jean Leca supervised his doctorate, which he obtained in 1994.

His doctoral thesis provided a philosophical reading of Max Weber, situated in the intellectual universe of the time, influenced by German philosophy.

He then examined the history of French republicanism, presented as a universal phenomenon, a characteristic that German romanticism and the English Enlightenment both dispute.

His ideas on Max Weber led him to examine Weber's position from two perspectives, namely the philosophy of law and the philosophy of history. He has worked on the possibility – which he regards Weber as having shut off – of re-opening the horizon of normativity in the wake of Habermas and Rawls, and has edited a multi-authored work on the topic, La Force du droit.

In the philosophy of history, he has examined this disappearance of the horizon of the future beyond the world as it, drawing on the thought of philosophers who lived through the secularization of the Jewish world in German lands, and who were strongly influenced by Judaic thought and Messianism even. His book Witnesses for the Future goes over the thought of Hermann Cohen, Emmanuel Lévinas, Ernst Bloch, Leo Strauss, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, and Hans Jonas.

He has also studied Hannah Arendt's work, looking at the first French edition of her book on totalitarianism, that he edited for the Gallimard Quarto collection, and analyzing her notebooks. Recently his research has examined the history of medieval philosophy in the Jewish and Arab worlds. He has published a book about Maimonides, a Jewish philosopher from Cordoba.