In this episode the focus is on the latest presidential elections in France and the state of its democracy. What were the significant differences between this election and the previous one? Is there a new wave of anti-intellectual sentiment spreading across the country? It also delves upon how current political entities manoeuvre their way within the framework of the traditional right/left divide: has Macron forsaken his liberal values and did that lead to reluctance among his voters? Did Marine Le Pen’s strategy of de-demonization work? How did the far-left fare and who did they vote for in the second round?
Guests featured in this episode:
Éric Fassin, Professor of sociology and co-chair of the Gender Studies Department at Paris VIII. University, where he also established the Research Center on Gender and Sexuality Studies. His research addresses sexual and racial politics as well as immigration issues, in France, Europe, and in the United States in a comparative perspective. He is currently working on book project with his brother, Didier Fassin, on The Rising Significance of Race in France, to be published the University of Chicago Press.
GLOSSARY:
How Assa Traoré became a symbolic figure in France?
(00:16:00 or p.4 in the transcript)
Assa Traoré is the sister of Adama Traoré, a black French man who died in police custody in 2016. Assa Traoré has been acquitted of defamation charges brought against her by police officers. She accused three police officers of killing her brother, but the investigators have been unable to agree if he was suffocated or if he died because of an underlying medical condition.
The death of Adama Traoré has elicited many parallels between George Floyd's death in the U.S. Assa Traoré, has become the symbolic figure of the Black Lives Matter movement in France. Source:
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What does Harry Frankfurt write On Bullshit?
(00:35:06 or p.8 in the transcript)
Harry Frankfurt, a moral philosopher, makes the following observation in his book: “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.”
Aspects of the bullshit problem are discussed partly with reference to the Oxford English Dictionary, Wittgenstein and Saint Augustine. Three points seem especially important – the distinction between lying and bullshitting, the question of why there is so much bullshit in the current day and age, and a critique of sincerity qua bullshit.
Frankfurt makes an important distinction between lying and bullshitting. Both the liar and the bullshitter try to get away with something. But ‘lying’ is perceived to be a conscious act of deception, whereas ‘bullshitting’ is unconnected to a concern for truth. Frankfurt regards this ‘indifference to how things really are’, as the essence of bullshit. Furthermore, a lie is necessarily false, but bullshit is not – bullshit may happen to be correct or incorrect. The crux of the matter is that bullshitters hide their lack of commitment to truth. Since bullshitters ignore truth instead of acknowledging and subverting it, bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies. Source:
S. R.: Welcome to "Democracy in Question", the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I'm Shalini Randeria, the Rector and President of the Central European University in Vienna and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva.
Welcome to the seventh episode of "Democracy in Question”, which is now in its fourth season. My guest today is Eric Fassin, Professor of Sociology and Co-Chair of the Gender Studies Department at Paris VIII. University, where he also established the Research Center on Gender and Sexuality Studies. His research addresses sexual and racial politics as well as issues of immigration in France, Europe, and the United States in a comparative perspective. He's currently working on a book project titled "The Rising Significance of Race in France" to be published by the University of Chicago Press this year.
I'll discuss with Eric the recent presidential elections in France which many saw as a crucial battleground for the fragile future of liberal democracy in Europe. President Macron won for a second time against the far-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, but the election revealed a deeply fractured France. We need to understand the difference between the present constellation and that in 2017 when Macron was first elected. Eric will explain why Macron's electoral victory has elicited a rather subdued response in France. Why is French society and polity so polarized with widespread disenchantment with the electoral politics and with all mainstream parties? What challenges does the far-right pose, not only to democracy in France but to the future of democratic politics in Europe? And why is the left so fragmented? How serious is the crisis of parliamentary representation and liberal democracy as witnessed in the French elections? What effect does the personalization of power in the person of the French President have for the traditional mass parties?
Is there a turn to alternative forms and modalities of political engagement? These are some of the questions I wish to discuss with Eric Fassin. Eric, welcome to the podcast, and thank you very much for making the time to be with me today.
E.F: Thank you, Shalini. It's a great pleasure to join this conversation.
S.R: Let's start Eric with an analysis of the French election results which show a polarized polity. 58.5% for Macron, 41.4% for Le Pen. What seemed to me a striking generational difference between two sets of people who voted for these candidates, is something I would like to talk to you about. While Macron seems to have attracted 70% of the votes of those over ages of 65 years old and 68% of those between ages of 18 and 24, 58% of the working-class vote seems to have gone to Le Pen. So, Macron’s overwhelming support comes from those who are not from the working-class population. This is then not just a demographic but also a class divide. And we've seen the classic urban–rural split here as we saw in the recent Hungarian elections or in the Brexit referendum, cities voting overwhelmingly for a liberal candidate while rural or so-called marginalized regions for the nationalist xenophobic far-right.
Is that the picture that you would see when you analyze the results of the French elections?
E.F: I think all of us are trying to make sense of what happened. And the first and most obvious element is the fact that the vote for the National Front that has become now the National Rally has increased considerably over the years. If we compare the last presidential election in 2017 to today, it's a constant increase. Now, this is not specific to the Macron era. However, there is something specific about the Macron era. Macron was elected not just as a neo liberal president, which, of course, everyone knew he'd been in charge of finance and the economy under Francois Hollande before. But he was also elected as a liberal president, that is one who insisted on rights. In particular, this was illustrated in an op-ed that he wrote in "Le Monde" on January 1st, 2017, where he declared that Angela Merkel had saved the honor of Europe by welcoming refugees.
So, he was a liberal in the sense that he was not playing on anti-immigration politics, and he was not developing, or so we thought, anti-immigration policies. However, this is not what happened. As soon as he was elected, the same policies that had developed over the years Nicholas Sarkozy on the right and then with Francois Hollande on the left, the same policies continued which means it showed that whether you were on the right or on the left or claiming to be neither one nor the other nor both at the same time, it doesn't matter. In the end, it's always the same. Now, the idea that whoever you vote for, makes no difference is, of course, very dangerous for democracy. And it's not just about immigration. It's also about the economy. There has been basically no major difference between the economic policies of Macron, Hollande, and Sarkozy.
So, there's continuity regardless of presidential changes. This, I think, illuminates the recent rise of the National Front because the argument of the National Front or now National Rally has always been right, left, it's all the same. It's the establishment. The result, of course, is not just people who vote for the far right. It's also people who don't vote. And that's the second element that is very striking is the increase in people not voting has reached a very high level. In France, it's about one-fourth of the electorate that hasn't voted in the second round. There's a third element, which is that Marine Le Pen has developed a strategy contrary to her father who always managed to remind people of the far-right origins of the party in particular by playing on antisemitic rhetoric.
She has distanced herself from her father when she came after him in the year 2010. And, in particular, the strategy has been called de-demonization. No one is talking about the far-right. Emmanuel Macron never once in the debate with Marine Le Pen used the word far-right. He never once used the word racism. So, in many ways, the strategy of Marine Le Pen, de-demonization worked. It's a party like any other and it's just a question of how competent she is or what the consequences of her economic policies are. That has become the only focus. And the fourth element is that this is related to what I have said before. If the president Emmanuel Macron is not really such a liberal president after all, if we have an illiberal, neoliberal president, regardless of what he says in his practices, his practices concerning migrants, police brutality, etc., if there's no such difference, why on Earth would people feel that they have to avoid the far-right at any cost?
Why on Earth would people, in particular on the left feel that he's the best protection against fascism; if in fact, many people start feeling that the differences are not so great between one and the other. Why would people make a difference between Macron and Le Pen? That's what's happened, I think, in the last few years.
S.R: But, Eric, if we look at the elections, one of the other things which becomes obvious is that Macron seems to have benefited from the last-minute support of millions of reluctant voters who finally did cast a ballot for him just in order to make sure that the far-right is kept out.
E.F: Indeed. I think what is remarkable is that many people on the left who hated the idea of voting for Macron, who had vowed not to do it again, at the last minute decided that they couldn't wake up on the Monday after the election and look themselves in the mirror if they had made it possible for Marine Le Pen to be elected president, which means that regardless of the interpretation of what's happened, many people decided, "Well, open fascism is more dangerous than what is in fact also an authoritarian regime but which at least claims not to be one."
So, it's basically a reward for hypocrisy. This I think is what has happened. But, of course, that's not everyone. And what is remarkable is that readily large segments of people who voted for Melenchon in the first round, eventually did vote for Marine Le Pen. That is quite remarkable. And in fact, what is interesting is that there might be an element to look into which, of course, is complicated given the fact that we don't have racial or ethnic statistics in France. But an element which I think would be interesting is what happened with racial minorities. How did they vote? We pretty much know how they voted in the first round. For example, we know that 70% according to polls of Muslims voted for Melenchon. That's a clear indication of the racial politics of all this.
We also know that Melenchon did extremely well both among the working class and the largely nonwhite suburbs such as the department Seine-Saint-Denis where I teach at Paris 8 University. He did very well. And so, he sorts of picked up on the history of the communist red belt around Paris. But also, if we look at overseas territories and departments, he did extremely well. So, in fact, in the first round, people who voted on racial grounds at least in part or with some racial or ethnic connotation voted for Melenchon. What did they do in the second round? What we know is that many didn't vote, in particular in Seine-Saint-Denis, North of Paris but also what we know and what has surprised many of us is that overseas, departments voted in particular, Guadeloupe, Martinique, voted for Marine Le Pen.
So, in fact, you have nonwhites who are so angry with Macron that they're willing to take the risk of voting for Marine Le Pen. It's not that they're blind to her racism. It's that the anger that they feel against the President goes so far as to make them decide that anything is better than this president. And that I think is very, very troubling.
S.R: So, let me pick up on a point that you have just mentioned. You’ve underlined the ethnic and racial belonging of some of the voters both for Melenchon and for Le Pen. How about thinking in terms of how the race as a factor which interacts with both class and the educational background of these supporters?
E.F: One of the lessons of the last few years has been the importance of intersectionality. We cannot just isolate one factor. And this has been reinforced by what happened with the COVID epidemic that is basically we know that working-class non-white population was hard hit. And we know that this very same population with perhaps a difference in terms of gender is the population that is involved in care professions. So, in fact, COVID has been an intersectional moment.
Now, if we look at the elections, of course, it tends to be when I talk about Seine-Saint-Denis, it's not just people who are more often than not nonwhite. It's also people who are more often than not poor, people who are more often than not young, unemployed, etc., etc. So, in fact, what we see is that it's very important not to isolate one factor. And it's not just race and class. If we look at what happened, what is interesting is that Macron got better-educated voters and Marine Le Pen got lesser-educated voters, and Melenchon got both, which I think is interesting. It's not basically a strict class definition. It has a wider range. And I think in that respect, what has happened with Melenchon this time is quite interesting. There are different brands of the left both ideologically and sociologically that have united in support of Melenchon.
So indeed, it's not just race. You have minorities that are overrepresented in working-class neighborhoods, clearly. But at the same time, what we've seen in France in the last few years is that there's a real presence of educated minorities, that is racial minorities have been mostly left out from public discussions, in part because they were less educated. However, this is changing, and this is changing in different ways. I mean, you can see some public figures, think of someone like Rokhaya Diallo who now has a column in the "Washington Post". She's an activist. Or think of someone like Assa Traoré. Assa Traoré, who's the sister of a young man who was killed in the hands of the gendarmerie and who has mobilized very powerfully in France antiracist groups and not just among nonwhites but also among whites.
And we could go on and take different examples. This is also true in the intellectual and cultural field. We start hearing more and more minorities, and they happen to be very often, more often than not, women. So, in fact, I think this is one of the changes which perhaps accounts for this panic that has developed in the last few years. It's not just that we're talking about race or, to be more precise, it's not just that people like me, that is someone who's white are talking about race because I've been doing that for quite a while. What has changed, I think, is that people like me are just one element now. And more and more, we have newer generations who are less white and where you have more women.
So, in fact, what may have scared many people is this change, which means that people like me, aging white men, are not the key to everything. The world is changing. I personally think that's one of the very best things that has happened in France. And, of course, it means that my relative importance may be declining but I think it means that the goal we're pursuing of more equality, of more participation in public discussions has bettered, has improved.
S.R: Does that explain in some way the shift that we've seen in right-wing rhetoric which has gone away from sort of obvious antisemitic, overtly racist, anti- EU messages and has embraced as we saw with Le Pen in this election much more populist welfare economic type of rhetoric trying to also exploit at the same time the longing for security, economic security and security from crime which is, again, of course, always racialized and attributed to immigrants? So, do we see a shift here due to the kind of visibility and the new voice that some of these minorities have finally found in French society?
E.F: I think you're right. Something has happened on the far-right. But it's partly something that has to be related to the fact that there were two far-right candidates in this election. In the first round, we had both Éric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen. There was also Nicolas Dupont-Aignan but who turned out to become a minor, marginal character. But Éric Zemmour occupied a lot of space, not mainly in the final vote but in the public discussion.
What is interesting is that I talked before about the de-demonization on the part of Marine Le Pen, in some ways, that opened the space for someone like Éric Zemmour, who re-demonized the far-right, that is who as a Jewish man had no qualms about playing on antisemitic rhetoric. So, he could, for example, rehabilitate the Vichy Regime. He could attack the parents of the two children who were murdered in terrorist attacks because they had buried their children in Israel. And so, in the name of a kind of French nationalistic rhetoric, he could play on antisemitic logics.
Now, what is interesting is that he got support mostly among the bourgeoisie, that is it hasn't been a working-class success. By contrast, Marine Le Pen has systematically played the class card but a class card that combines easily and that is very much an intersectional logic combining class and race. Of course, she did not invent that. It's a rhetoric that is very familiar in the U.S., for example, that is basically playing the white working class against those parasites that are allegedly using the welfare system but not as a way of openly dismantling the welfare system but as a way of saying it should be reserved to deserving people, implicitly white.
So, she has divided the working class because it doesn't mean the working class as a whole has joined the National Front. What has happened is part of the working class has voted for Melenchon but also a large part of the working class, the larger part of the working class has not voted. The working class we tend to think of as naturally on the left but that's never been the case. In fact, the working class is divided. There's a right-wing working class and there's a left-wing working class. But what's happened to the right-wing working class? They stopped voting for the right-wing parties, and they started voting for far-right parties.
So, in 2017, they didn't vote for Fillon. In 2022, they didn't vote for Pecresse, Valerie Pecresse. In both cases, they voted for Marine Le Pen. So, right-wing working-class voters have shifted to the far-right. Now, what happened with left-wing working-class voters? Well, some of them still vote on the left, of course. Very few have shifted to the right or the far right but many of them have stopped voting. That's why in the end we get the impression that the working class is voting for Marine Le Pen. It's because those who don't vote for Marine Le Pen, we don't talk about. And that's one element that I think we have to take very seriously, people who do not vote. First, because it's a large number, a fourth of the electorate. Second, because the categories of young people, the categories of minorities, the categories of working-class, they're all overrepresented.
If we take, for example, youth, young people vote much less than older people which means that older voters - and this goes back to your first question -older voters determine the vote. I personally think and of course, I'm not the only one, that nonvoters are not just people who don't like politics or who don't care about politics. Not voting is very much a political thing today. Not voting is saying, "Politics, as it happens in elections, has nothing to do with my life. It has nothing to do with real politics."
And I think that is very important because we tend to imagine that these people don't care about politics. No. In fact, if we want to understand what's been going on in French politics, we have to understand that politics is taking place very much outside of the political field. And one of the consequences is that many people feel, "Of course, I'm interested in politics but not in politics as they are organized in the institutional field."
So, what we have seen in the last few years is social movements that very much spoke about politics from Black Lives Matter to Me Too but also to the Yellow Vests, to the mobilizations against the labor laws, etc. All these very impressive social movements that have basically no political visibility if we're thinking of the political field and if we're thinking of elections. For example, the many people who mobilize in support of migrants, how are they represented politically? How was this discussed in the political campaign for the presidential election? All this disappeared. The antiracist movement, not one discussion. Feminism, nothing, etc. And I could talk also about climate change and the mobilizations in society. That's not really been part of the campaign. So, politics tends to be these days outside of the political field.
S.R: Let me turn to another aspect that you have mentioned and that is the enormous concentration of power in the hands of the French President. So, in effect it’s become a rather personalized or one could say almost quasi-monarchic constellation that French democracy has ended up with. But what you also referred to was not only an authoritarian or soft authoritarian kind of a strong woman, who has emerged here and has solidified his power, but the fact that the boundary between liberal and illiberal practices has got so blurred that actually, we have in a sense, as you said, the hypocrisy of political liberalism in the rhetoric of illiberalism. Could you say something about how this boundary has got blurred and the kind of hypocrisy that we have witnessed?
E.F: Well, of course, not everyone in France would agree with my analysis. Some people would say, "Of course Macron has not been perfect but he's still a liberal president." So, there's no consensus on this. But what I say is not just my personal opinion. I think that's reflected in the vote. The fact that it has been so difficult for many left-wing voters to vote for Macron is a reflection not just of his neoliberal policies but also of his authoritarian tendencies. Police brutality has been a major factor in changing the perception that we have. I mean, people are scared to demonstrate today in France. Because so many people have lost an eye, some people have lost a hand in demonstrations, and nothing has happened despite the fact that the Defender du droit, the ombudsman in France has systematically protested against state policies.
And this is one example. But also, for example, the illegal treatment of migrants from the border with Italy to the border with Britain. For example, the police tearing apart the tents of migrants in Calais, etc., systematically, and the denial of all this. So, all these elements I think are very important if we want to understand what has happened for many people who feel the difference is not so great between one and the other.
But I will take another example which is that of attacks against academics. And when we saw that attacks against academia took place, not just in Hungary but also in places like Brazil or like Turkey, we thought, "In some ways, we're on the better side. We're on the side where we're protected against this anti-intellectual rhetoric, against these threats leveled against critical discourse."
And of course, even today, we can see that in the U.S. you have republicans mobilizing against critical race theory or in Britain or in other countries. But what is remarkable is that it's not just these openly illiberal parties and regimes. In fact, the case of France is a reminder that ostensibly liberal regimes can share in the same rhetoric. So, there's an internationalization. And the attacks against academia in France I think have to be taken seriously for that reason. Of course, we could say that it's very different from what happened in Turkey, where many people have lost their jobs and their passports, etc. But I think it's a difference of degree. It’s not a difference of nature. In fact, what is interesting is that the attacks leveled against academia in France that started with the far-right, that were then propagated by some media, magazines, and newspapers, etc., these attacks have been joined by President Macron himself when he started accusing academics in June 2020 of being guilty, guilty of breaking the republic into two pieces because how they exploited the race card by ethnicionalizing the social question.
That was his argument. And it’s been picked up by his Minister of Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, who went so far after the decapitation of a teacher in France. Jean-Michel Blanquer said that some so-called Islamo-leftists, that is people who talk about islamophobia were intellectually complicit with terrorism. That's a very harsh accusation, especially as some of us, including myself, receive not only insults but also threats including death threats because we’re accused of being Islamo-leftist. And that is important in my view because it's anti-intellectualism as a political weapon. Anti-intellectualism is today a weapon used by so-called populists, whom I would prefer to call neofascists and by neoliberals who are becoming more and more authoritarian. The distinction is not so clear, in particular when we talk about anti-intellectualism.
And anti-intellectualism in my view is fundamental to understand the political battles that are taking place today because there are two visions of society. Do we want people to be smart or do we want people to be stupid? I think some politicians want people to be stupid. They prefer people watching dumb shows on television than asking questions. So, in fact, the political battle about academia is not just about academia. It's about democracy. What do we want the population to be like? A population that raises questions or a population that is basically ignorant or indifferent that does not want to participate? So, the attacks on academics are not just against academics. They're against democracy.
S.R: Eric, let me close by asking you a question on a book you wrote 10 years ago titled "Precarious Democracy" because you wrote the book in French the argument probably didn't resonate much outside of France but the argument you were making was to warn us all against what you call “the art of confusion” pointing to the fact that there's a skillful mastery by politicians these days of certain languages, vocabularies and rhetoric which discredit any vestige of truth as truth and that there lies the danger both to democracy and to academic freedom.
E.F: Indeed, I published this volume in 2012 but the starting point, in particular, was an op-ed I wrote in "Le Monde" in 2007 during the campaign for Sarkozy's election about “the art of confusion”, as you just said. My idea was that Sarkozy was saying one thing and doing the opposite. The result, of course, made it very complicated for people to criticize him because he could say, "No, no, I'm just saying the opposite." So, there was no real discussion about what he was doing. Confusion meant that you couldn't have the definition of different positions, taking sides for this, against that. So, in some ways, it sorts of reinforced the logic that I have described before, that is there is no alternative. It's not this or that. It's both. And, of course, it was picked up by Emmanuel Macron himself.
He has used the phrase “en nême temps”, at the same time. So, you can say one thing and the opposite at the same time, “en nême temps”. Now, I think this art of confusion is part of a general strategy that has developed with the President sort of occupying the ground and making journalists so busy that they don't have time to think. They're just sort of running after the President. But more profoundly, as you said, I think it has to do with the status of truth. We know, of course, in the case of Donald Trump that we have not just fake news, but we also have alternative facts. And that I think has been an essential element because alternative facts, that's a contradiction, an obvious contradiction in terms but what it means is “I don't care that you know it's a contradiction. You can be as smart as you want, you can start rationally explaining that it's absurd, that it's stupid. Who cares?”
And I think that has happened more and more, - and I think neofascist regimes play on that systematically-, but there's a tendency in authoritarian neoliberal regimes to play the same card and to empty words of their meaning, that is the point is not to lie any longer. Lying is the traditional art of politics. The new art of politics is to say what I call in French “n’importe quoi” it could be anything, but I would translate it more brutally and using a reference to Harry Frankfurt, a philosopher. It's bullshit. Bullshit I think as this philosopher explained is very important because it's not lying. Lying still means you have some respect for truth, that is you're pretending that what you're saying is truthful. So, of course, it's not ideal but at least it means that truth still matters.
Now, if you say “n’importe quoi” if you say bullshit, that means true or not, it's irrelevant. It can be both “en nême temps”, at the same time. Confusion becomes the logic of all this because truth becomes irrelevant in this kind of political discourse. We're spending a lot of energy trying to prove that this is meaningless, but this is, of course, a losing battle because the person who's speaking on the position of power is basically adding confusion to confusion. And what we see here explains the attacks on academia. And this is an element that I feel very strongly about. Why is it so important for people who don't care about intellectual life to attack intellectual life? You would think, for example, that in the U.S. where there's not that much value attached to high culture or to academia except to get jobs, etc., but there's no shared fascination for the grandeur of intellectual life. So how come all these attacks are occurring?
And I think there's a good reason. We are in the world of academic freedom. Academic freedom is not the same thing as freedom of speech. Freedom of speech means I can say anything I want, which means I'm allowed to say stupid things. I'm allowed to say things that are not true. Academic freedom means the obligation not to say “n’importe quoi”, the responsibility to avoid bullshit. So, in fact, the battle that is taking place today against academia and, in particular, against critical thought is a battle about democracy because in fact, today one of the last places where people have this moral, ethical, professional obligation not to say “n’importe quoi” that’s academia. And that is why I think academia has to be taken seriously. Our enemies take academia seriously. We have to take academia seriously. We have a responsibility that is even greater than usual because we may be the only profession that has institutionalized the idea that you cannot just say “n’importe quoi”, that you cannot just indulge in bullshit.
Therefore, we have a democratic responsibility today more than ever.
S.R: Thank you so much, Eric, not only for this impassioned plea for academic freedom as the bedrock for critical thinking and for the formation of democratic citizenship and public democratic life but also for your very astute and nuanced analysis of the French elections, and what it means for the future of liberal democracy in Europe. Thanks very much for being with me today.
E.F: Thank you so much, Shalini. It's a pleasure having this discussion and let's hope it's useful.
S.R: Let me wrap up our discussion. The vote share of the far-right in the French elections has increased steadily over the years. President Macron's politics, especially on immigration has helped to bolster support for the far-right which has in the process become normalized. One-quarter of the French electorate did not cast a ballot at all in this election. Especially the French working class and young voters abstained. One reason for that is that they did not want to reward Macron's hypocrisy for they see it is an effect as an authoritarian regime many of who's practices have been decidedly illiberal. For example, police brutality against peaceful demonstrations has escalated this disaffection with liberal democracy and with Macron. Not voting, therefore, is a political statement. It should alert us that politics is taking place elsewhere, outside the field of electoral politics.
Two years of COVID have coincided with the refusal of the Macron government to face up to questions of race, ethnical identity, and religious differences in a multicultural society. The attacks on academics who are raising these questions of race, postcolonialism, sexuality, and gender can be seen as a reaction to the growing visibility and also audibility of young immigrants in French public life. These attacks against academia should be taken extremely seriously. Anti-intellectualism is a political weapon in the fight against democracy, democracy which thrives on academic freedom and critical thought.
Freedom of speech is the freedom to hold and to express any opinion, even if it is bullshit. Academic freedom, however, comes with responsibility. The responsibility to distinguish between truth and falsehood. Academic freedom then needs opinions which are substantiated by evidence and by argument.
This was the seventh episode of season four. Thank you very much for listening. Join us also for the next episode in two weeks' time when I'll be joined by Lord Hastings, the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the School of African and Oriental Studies in London and Professor of Leadership at the Huntsman Business School in the U.S. We will talk about the great threats posed by the erosion of democracy, in contemporary United Kingdom, but also in the world over in the light of a debate on these questions in the British House of Lords . Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed and, of course, let your friends know about this podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the Central European University at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch/democracy.