In many European countries, universities are asked to become more market-oriented. Those who oppose this trend mostly invoke a traditional university ideal to make their case. This paper aims to look for a third way to conceptualise a university that is neither marketoriented nor traditionalist. It finds such an alternative by looking at a democratic culture in which knowledge remains indeterminate and subject to debate. It concretely demonstrates that this alternative view allows us to identify problematic aspects of contemporary discourses on universities, as exemplified by the European Commission's discourse. It ends by arguing that the alternative vision is more in tune with the grassroots reality of research and education than the market-oriented view.
The polymath Michel de Certeau is traditionally seen as one of a group of French poststructuralist thinkers who reject constructs in the social sciences in favor of the diversity of the everyday or the past. However, in this paper I will show that, as a historian, Certeau did not discard these constructs, but rather valued them as a means of doing justice to the "strangeness" of the past. The position that Certeau adopts can be seen most clearly from his theoretical debate with Paul Veyne, which is the starting point of this article. I then show how Certeau's first major historical work, The Possession at Loudun, exemplifies his theoretical position. An analysis of this work demonstrates how the historian's active reconstruction of interactions between exorcists, medical doctors, state officers, and possessed nuns helps us to perceive the complexity of the past in a way that can be seen as a microhistory avant la lettre. I will suggest that during his writing of the history of Loudun, Certeau implicitly raises more theoretical and epistemological problems, and in so doing he "practices" a theory of history. The most elusive aspect of the story at Loudun turns out to be the drama around the priest Grandier. This article demonstrates how Certeau pays tribute to Grandier by using "scientific" methods, thus showing the "limits of representation" through disciplinary means. Finally, the article explores the implications of Certeau's theory and practice of the writing of history for understanding historiography at large. The historian not only appears as a tramp who looks for remains that are forever lost to us, but is also a "scientist" who uses both models and concepts in order to put them to the test.
This article reveals how Marcel Gauchet and his late wife Gladys Swain revise Foucault's history of madness and modernity by arguing that the history of modern civilization represents a recognition of the mad, rather than their exclusion. Turning to the French Revolution, the article then examines the relationship between disciplinary practices and a wider democratic context. It shows that while Foucault reduces democratic societies to proto totalitarian practices, Gauchet and Swain give a broader and more historically complex account of asylums and the democratic context in which they emerge. This allows them to see resistance in the asylum and in democratic societies in general: while Foucault thought the panoptic asylum revealed modernity's ultimate success, for Gauchet and Swain it proved only its failure. However, the article ends by arguing that, despite all their differences, Gauchet and Swain's critique of contemporary societies remains in some respects indebted to Foucault.
This article shows how Jürgen Habermas and Claude Lefort try to explain the relationship between universality and particularity in modern democratic societies, politics and civil society. It will demonstrate that Habermas defends a substantive kind of universality that is opposed to particular positions and thus to real politics. This article further argues that Lefort's lesser known theory of negative universality is better at combining a universal and a particular perspective. It claims that where Habermas requires citizens to transform their particular interests, Lefort emphasizes that individual actors should acknowledge their particular position and interests when invoking universal principles. The article further argues that their disagreement leads to a different interpretation of ideology, politics, power, civil society, human rights, popular sovereignty, elections and the state.
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