The European universities, citizenship and its Limits: What won't solve the problems of our time

Abstract

This article attempts to weave together in an original manner a number of themes regarding citizenship and higher education in Europe. Thus, the authors look critically at the notion of citizenship itself; its role in Aristotle and in Hegel's state-versus-civil-society contrast; its relation to the world of work or labour; its connection with the concept of Bildung ('general edification'); the originally divergent strands of the twentieth-century American assault on Bildung in higher education, an assault now extended to Europe, especially in European Union policy and (in a more complex and contradictory manner) in the Bologna process; the marketized university as a psychotic organization; and - a twist in the story - the reaction to some of these developments in the ideology of citizenism, which the authors problematize.