New APPS

There is a lot of controversy and protest among the students at Stanford University concerning what many are calling the mild punishment of a male undergraduate, found by a university committee to have been guilty of sexual misconduct and sexual assault using force.   The student will receive a five-quarter suspension, which will begin after he graduates, and he will be allowed to enroll at Stanford as a graduate student (he had already been admitted) after taking a “gap year.”

In this article about the events at Stanford, the Huffington Post details some disturbing statistics about the punishments doled out to sexual assailants at some of Stanford’s “peer institutions”.   It appears to be Stanford’s policy, for example, to allow such assailants to return to campus once their victims have graduated.   Since the victim in this case is graduating this year, the suspension is very short.  (And, inter alia, since 20% of U.S. college women have suffered some form of sexual assault by a male student, but around 5% of male college students sexually assault women, allowing students to return to campus to repeat offend seems like a terrible idea.)

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I originally intended Europe after Habermas and the Populist Surge,  to be a stand alone post and did not have any thoughts about promoting my own tentative views of European politics, and the appropriate theoretical references for discussion. It was just intended to be a timely account of the limitation of one approach to Europe and an indication of the role of one kind of theory in that approach.

I have been challenged to put forward my own views on the political and theoretical issues, and I do not think I can decently fail to respond, as clearly it is easy to take shots at someone else's point of view that put forward an alternative, which might become a target itself, and might disappoint some people who agree with my critical remarks. Another aspect of putting forward your own views is that it requires more space then defining weaknesses in another point of view, and this process is going to take more than one post. The present post will set up an overview and will be followed by posts dealing with institutions, policies, and theory. 

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Philosophers on social media, blogs, and other platforms have been increasingly  discussing the Student Union ban on the Nietzsche Club at University College London  in the last day or so. Sorry I'm not providing links, because I'm not looking for an online rumble, but here are some links to news stories. The first thing to say is that this ban is horrendous and the second is that it has been lifted pending legal advice. What also needs to be understood is that the student union decision was not an attempt to ban discussion of Nietzsche, though it certainly circumscribes discussion of Nietzsche in UCL student union facilities.

The ban was in reaction to a poster of the 'Nietzsche Club' advertising discussion of Alain de Benoist and Julius Evola, alongside Heidegger and Nietzsche. Benoist is the founding and presiding figure of the 'Nouvelle Droite' (New Right, but not to be confused with the Anglosphere free market New Right of the 1980s) in France, which is anti-globalist and anti-free market, also opposing cultural pluralism within nations. Julius Evola (1898-1974) was a writer on southern Asian religion and spirituality, and known to some only in that role. He was also an advocate of authoritarianism, hierarchy and 'tradition',  with tradition to be understood as inherently anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, and anti-modern. Like Benoist now, he liked to present

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Shortly after elections to the European Parliament, and in the midst of political jostling over the name of the next President of the Commision, is a timing that makes a post on European politics and  the idea of Europe  timely, though the issues are constantly with us and I suspect that problems in the European Union will keep it constantly in the news. What looks like serious legitimacy problems for the European Union also has the consequence of creating a European public opinion of a kind, in that Europe is in the news across the nations of the continent. 

One theoretical approach to Europe seems to me very much questioned  though advocates presumably will not think so. That is the approach of Habermas, who has become the uncrowned philosophical prince of the European Union. The radical egalitarian who makes some claims to some continuity with Marxism is invited to speak events with the highest EU dignitaries present and so appears to be de facto accepted by the European centre right as well as the more left inclined, as the philosophical voice of the European project. His version of Neo-Marxism, Post-Marxism, Liberal-Marxist fusionism,  or however else his thought is best described, is an interesting case of apparent radical critique becoming part of the self-understanding of an elite. His emphasis on the rationality and ethics of political discourse evidently has some appeal to those who make a living from the European Union, and researchers close to that world. The thinking of such people (and I have been personally acquainted with some) is very much along the lines that the EU institutions represent reason and informed decisions making, while strong criticism reflects 'populist' ignorance, stereotyping, and scapegoating.

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