Roy Bhaskar (1944-2014) was born to an Indian father and an English mother. His father was a medical doctor and his mother, who had spent most of her childhood in South Africa, was a homemaker. It was expected that Roy would follow in the footsteps of his father and become a doctor, but he rebelled against this idea and managed to free himself from this fate by gaining a scholarship to study at Balliol College, Oxford. There, in 1966, he obtained a first-class honours degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. His PhD thesis, supervised by Rom Harre, eventually became the well-received and highly influential book "A Realist Theory of Science", published in 1975. Bhaskar lectured at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Sussex. He was Adjunct Professor in Philosophy at the Centre for Peace Studies at the University of Tromsø, Norway, and Guest Professor in Philosophy and Social Science, Department of Caring Sciences, Örebro University, Sweden. From 2007, Bhaskar was employed at the Institute of Education in London as World Scholar.

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Early on, Roy was strongly influenced by indigenous movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America; and all his best friends were from the "Third World". One of his first acts of political identification was to join a group that was studying the Algerian revolutionary, Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), an existentialist. He was also very active in movements in solidarity with the liberation struggles going on in Vietnam and Cuba. When he married Hilary Wainwright (1949-), they travelled to the Portuguese territories of Mozambique and Angola as guests of the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola [Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola]). Bhaskar joined the Labour Party
for a short period. He knew Tony Benn, a prominent member of the Labour Party, and most of his friends were Bennites. Bhaskar ascribed his general interest in questions of social justice to, amongst other things, his severe experience of racism in the English school system.

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