Organized sport was first developed in Germany in the form of the so-called Turnvereine, and in England at the public schools. It came to France later, at the end of the nineteenth century. Despite this, the modern Olympic Games was a French invention, the result of the ambitions and efforts of an aristocratic admirer of England, Baron Pierre de Coubertin. His ideas and attitudes were in many ways characteristic of fin-de-siècle France.

It has long been known that the vast majority of the Annunciation pictures show the Virgin on their right. All former studies, including one by the present author, treat this as a problem of left-right or mirror symmetry. This is not correct: this symmetry exchanges the right and left hands and such a transformation is not permitted: Gabriel, must always be represented as right-handed. That this is so emerged from the study of a database that we have created, which contains 1007 Annunciations from C3 to 1750. Details of this database, which the author intends to put in the public domain in due course, and of other results, will be left for a further paper. It is a sufficient example here that from C3 to 1400 Gabriel shows his right hand to the Virgin in 62 items out of 93, and the left hand in only two. Even from 1401 to 1750 the Angel shows his right hand to the Virgin 278 times and only 22 for the left. A brief pictorial study of the evolution of the Annunciation paintings from C3 onwards shows why the right-handedness of Gabriel made it easier for the painter to present him on the left. A summary table of the results obtained from the database is provided. This study offers some explanation of the fact pointed out in a former paper that sculptural representations of the Annunciation are often variant, with the Virgin on the left.

The numerous interpretations and evaluations of 1968 that have been developed over the past half-century can arguably be divided into two. On one side, there are those accounts that regard 1968 as the threshold across which an older form of modernity passed to become what student revolutionaries of the period began to call late capitalism; and although late capitalism itself quickly became a fissured thing, this view has become orthodox. On the other side, there are those who insist that ’68 was a Badiousian event, an outbreak of liberatory possibilities to which we not only have a responsibility to remain faithful, but which provided a template for later more or less insurrectionary movements; undoubtedly the strongest argument for ’68’s enduring radical meaning and potential has been made by Kristin Ross in her 2002 book, May ’68 and its Afterlives. This article is partly committed to arguing for a middle way between these two views. I accept that the processes leading to and following the events of 1968 triggered the development of a new kind of capitalist society as well as formed the template for the radicalisms we now have. This mediation might seem to involve a contradiction, but in the end it is more accurate not to see these two views as they see themselves, namely as enemies, but rather as dialectically and functionally united. Without the kind of capitalism that the 1960s triggered, no radical movement politics; without radical, post-communist movement politics, no such late capitalism. To see that, we need to think about ’68 in larger contexts and terms than is usual. I will call the context I wish to bring to bear general secularization.

Science is often seen as empirical inquiry that aims at proof or explanation, but eschews normative considerations. This, I shall argue, is inadequate. Scientific thinking and practice also depend on additional standards, including a range of norms that are not and cannot be established by empirical methods. It follows that science cannot and should not aspire to be value free.

American sculptor David Smith moved fluidly between media to elicit the kind of aesthetic reaction that he believed was unique to and inherent in modern art. As remediation of his sculpture, Smith’s photography attains its own performative power by establishing a new aesthetic relationship with its spectators. This article applies Lars Elleström’s medium-centred model of communication to the analysis of the intermedial quality of David Smith’s photography. By emphasizing the significance of mediality and communication, it offers a new interpretation of the transmutation of modern sculpture as an alternative to modernist aesthetics. In this way, this case study of David Smith’s photography functions as an initiative of expanding the research of intermediality beyond formalistic analysis, by integrating art history with communication and media studies.

In this essay I discuss the emergence of the Mao cult during the Cultural Revolution in China and its appropriation in cultural revolutions in Europe and the United States to show how this image resonated with similar cults of popular icons in the West and lent itself to the formulation of theories and practices of postmodernism. The image quality of these cults facilitated the rise of the Mao-craze in the late 1980s and 1990s when political pop productions of Mao by Chinese artists emerged in New York and were then transplanted to China where they met with transfigurations of Mao’s legacy in the People’s Republic. The final stage of postmodern variations of Mao is reached with the presidency of Barack Obama in 2009 and the merging of the two leaders into Chairman Obamao or Comrade Maobama, which can be read as the end of ideological contrast between the two countries for the sake of creating a system of political interdependence for the 21st century, a postmodern prefiguration of a coming ChinAmerica.

I support a fundamental principle stressed by the Encyclopédie, that the Unity of Knowledge is the direct consequence of the unity of the human brain. All of us are animated by what Claude Bernard called a ‘kind of thirst for the unknown’ which ennobles and enlivens scientific inquiry. We must humbly confess for now our immense ignorance – ignoramus. But to satisfy Claude Bernard’s ‘ardent desire for knowledge’ we should never say, as some philosophers still do, ignorabimus about the human brain. Thanks to recent developments in neuroscience, we can now propose a common set of brain processes that account for the production of the diversity of knowledge. Thanks to these processes, we can work on a reunification of the true, the good and the beautiful, not as a uniform, monotonous culture, but as a network of cooperative diversity favouring intellectual and emotional exchanges among disciplines.

This article introduces a collection of essays about the construction of a cultural landscape in Eastern and Central Europe. This part of the world has been subjected to violent changes over the past hundred years that have also left their marks on the landscape, especially in the wake of the Second World War and after the fall of the Iron Curtain. It is suggested that the cultural dimension of these changes will be approached as a multimodal palimpsest, where old layers have partially been erased and overwritten by new layers of landscape text, with the old text still being more or less readable to the researcher. In addition, it is emphasized that this process of rewriting is still ongoing, in attempts to inscribe landscapes within ethnocentric frameworks.

Did science develop differently in different ancient civilisations, and if so, why? This article compares the development of medicine, mathematics and astronomy in ancient Greece and ancient China. It identifies certain significant differences in the way in which the problems were formulated and the aims and methods used to resolve them, and it relates these to the social institutions and values of the society within which the scientists work.

In this article we introduce the Schumpeterian growth paradigm, where growth results from innovations that render previous innovations obsolete. We show how this paradigm can be used to elucidate enigmas in recent growth history, such as the growth take-off, secular stagnation, and the middle-income trap. We then illustrate how the Schumpeterian paradigm can be tested using rich micro data, focusing on the relationship between product market competition and innovation-led growth. Finally, we use the paradigm to question some common wisdoms on growth policymaking.

The human species is beset by ‘risks’; one of which is related to its exposed position on the Earth as it travels through cosmic space. An examination is made of the major risks – those associated with cometary impact, with solar emissions and with the explosions of nearby stars. Estimates are given of the risks associated with trying to avoid the effect of these phenomena. Not surprisingly it is concluded that more work is necessary.

The US media are undergoing a massive transformation, approaching a crisis in journalism, which may portend similar issues in Europe and the rest of the world. Historically, most professional journalism has been done by the print media, especially newspapers. Today, American newspapers are in a state of collapse with circulation dropping at a rapid rate and profitability going to nil or negative. This business is leading to an information crisis that is already having effects on the society and will likely become even more profound, polarizing and perhaps misinforming an entire nation. Print journalists have been the primary suppliers to the electronic media, including television and the internet. This article supplements a speech given at the American Academy in Berlin in May, 2008. It summarizes US media metrics and raises issues of concern about the sustainability of serious journalism in America. While the internet has been the cause of this dilemma, the author sees no economic model that will allow the web in the short term to support major, serious reporting at a large scale. Is the rest of the world about to experience a similar crisis or are media models different enough to avoid such a dramatic fall? This article reflects Baker’s view as a longtime media executive and an academic.

Along with those case studies he did on the Middle East, the Cyprus case study that is presented here was meant to have been part of István Bibó's Paralysis of International Institutions and the Remedies. A Study of Self-Determination, Concord among the Major Powers, and Political Arbitration (Hassock, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1976), written between 1965 and 1974, but it was finally left out of the volume. István Bibó (1911–1979) was a seminal Hungarian democratic political thinker, international lawyer, and the last legitimate minister of the 1956 revolution, and, in this case study, he pointed out that there is no such entity as a Cypriot nation. Cyprus is the clashing and splitting area of the Greek and the Turkish nation-making processes. His detailed analysis is based upon this assumption. It has been translated by Péter Pásztor (Szentendre, Hungary).

The essay deals with the criterion and the distortion of making democratic political culture the basis of the democratic political community in the context of the traumatic historical experiences. The historical traumas of the communities may lead to a fluid or vacuum situation, a non-democratic consolidation, a fall back to personal power, even political hysteria if the assessment of the situation is wrong and bad aims are chosen; to a situation that could bring almost all the countries of Europe to the brink of disaster, and only those countries that could recall democratic political culture and education will be able to keep up with the rise of democratic crowd emotion. A comparative European research into the ways and means of processing collective traumas is not only an area that might shed new light on political phenomena, but a requirement of democratic functioning.

In this article, I examine how defeat in war has shaped intellectual discourse in postwar Japan, particularly intellectual debates on war guilt. Known as ‘war responsibility debates’ in Japanese, the disconnection that is imposed on national identity by defeat has led to a number of different responses from Japanese opinion leaders and scholars. Implicit in these responses is a desire to restore fundamental continuity, either by revising the appraisal of war, or by making guilt the unifying element in a transwar national identity. Defeat is the crux of the issue around which intellectuals have had to navigate in their quest for a continuous history for postwar Japan. This article considers the contributions made to this debate by Maruyama Masao, a pioneering thinker on political thought in postwar Japan; by the scholars in the Science of Thought Research Group in their study of political apostasy (tenkō) and the more recent advent of revisionist historians in the ‘Liberal School of History’ group. I conclude that this ongoing debate should itself be regarded as a positive phenomenon, as it continues to presume a basic link between the war and accountability that is fundamental to the integrity of Japan's postwar democracy.

Words can be confusing and titles can be misleading, particularly if titles consist of one simple word. Two titles suffice to illustrate this phenomenon. In 2000, a book appeared with the title Empire and in 2002 another book appeared with exactly the same title. In the first Empire, Michael Hardt, an American literary theorist, and Antonio Negri, an Italian political philosopher, argued that although classical imperialism is over, Empire is alive and well, albeit in a new form. For them ‘Empire’ means the following: ‘Our basic hypothesis is that sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire.’ This is a rather special definition of Empire because what one usually has in mind when using that word is something very different. It is the Empire that the other book, written by the British historian Niall Ferguson, is about. This book describes, as the subtitle indicates, The Rise and Demise of the British World Order. But it is also about something more, as is apparent from the rest of the subtitle: and the Lessons for Global Power. These lessons are intended for the rulers of the Empire of today, the Americans. While the first Empire is the Bible for anti-globalists, Ferguson's book can be considered as the New Testament of the advocates of America's imperial ambitions.

The idea of continuous progress for mankind is no longer unquestioned. Problems of equality, rationality and emotion are unsolved. Conflict exists between cultural conformity and the threat of internationalism. In particular, modern rationalism is in conflict with traditional beliefs.

In the first part of this paper the molecular epidemiological evidence linking HPV to cervical cancer and other genital cancers is reviewed based mainly on the research work of the author. In the second part, the implications of the epidemiological findings for the prevention of cervical cancer are discussed in two areas: in primary prevention by the use of prophylactic HPV vaccines and in secondary prevention by increasing the accuracy of cervical cancer screening.

‘Philosophical anthropology’ was initiated in the late 1920s as an alternative to abstract philosophical definitions of human nature (‘animal rationale’) and to the exclusively empirical, physical study of anthropology. Philosophical anthropology focused upon what it meant to be a human being. Its founders concentrated upon the situated existence of human beings and their ability to think beyond and to deny even what was actually vitally important to them. For Cassirer, these efforts remained too abstract because they failed to take the breadth of human cultural activity into account. The decisive feature of human life is neither reason nor language. These are derivative from symbolism, not the other way around. Human beings are best described as ‘animal symbolicum’. The error of earlier anthropological conceptions was not that they venerated reason, but that they ignored the body and so separated reason from emotion. The concept of symbolism, as Cassirer conceived it, overcame this dualism. His philosophical anthropology has been vindicated today in many areas of empirical research, but replacing the concept of ‘reason’ with that of ‘symbolism’ was no minor revision to the Western philosophical tradition, and the amplification and application of this new outlook has barely begun.

(Translation: Stefan Menhofer, 2004, revised by Peter Burke, 2005)

The question: ‘How to write the history of Europe?’ can only be answered in context. The reply depends on what sort of readership one wants to write for, what ideas one entertains about tasks of exploring and conveying historical studies, how one views the relation of European history to other forms of historiography. The following reflections seek to take up and connect with one another two strands of historiographical discussion which are surprisingly disconnected, namely the discussions about concepts of European history and of global history. Suggestions for a European history in a global context, such as are presented here under the heading ‘exceptionalism’, are based not only on theoretical reflections but also on several attempts to put them into practice over the past few years.