The European Universities, Citizenship and its Limits: What Won't Solve the Problems of Our Time

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

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.