Billig was born in 1947 to a Jewish family from London and he went to the University of Bristol to study Philosophy and Psychology.
While at Bristol he was taught by Professor Henri Tajfel, a renowned social psychologist, who was to have an enduring and profound influence on Billig.
The pamphlet was extended into a full-length book, L'Internationale Raciste (1981), which also looked at European links between psychology and the extreme-right .
For example, he suggests that attitudes are best understood not as individual positions on topics, but as rhetorical stances in argumentative contexts.
Ideological Dilemmas (1988), which was collectively written with his Loughborough colleagues, Condor, Edwards, Gane, Middleton and Radley, argued that if you look closely at the ways people justify and criticise, it is possible to see how common sense and everyday thinking are not marked by consistency as many social psychologists suppose.
At Loughborough he was a founding member of the influential Discourse and Rhetoric Group, which included figures such as Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter.
The group, which stressed that psychologists should examine in detail the way language is used, was central to the creation of discursive psychology.
Billig argued that, when it comes to describing human actions, heavy technical nouns are, in fact, often less precise than ordinary language.