Diogenes has set itself the task to present to its readers the most recent developments in all important branches of the Humanities. Among the most burning questions in the sphere of contemporary political sciences is the one raised by the almost universal demand for the ‘Welfare State’.

The twentieth-century state owes to man not only order, peace, and justice, it owes him also material well-being. The search for and the study of the means by which public power can provide for such well-being have added an important chapter to the history of political theory and the art of government.

Professor A. C. Pigou has had a decisive part in the genesis of this great intellectual and moral mutation. He is the uncontested master of the new technique. Diogenes is proud and happy indeed to have the privilege of presenting his original and deep thoughts on the idea of the State as the producer of well-being, on the origins of this concept and the methods of its development. These ideas throw new light on the evolution of the great modern states and put a new and efficient tool into the hands of those who strive to understand and explain this evolution.

The internet has revolutionized religious growth and dissemination. It is multifunctional in this respect, and multi-disciplinarity is required in order to comprehend and benefit from its technological advances. It is still hard to discern whether the internet is predominantly utopian or dystopian in its effects, and a helpful conceptual distinction is that between ‘religion online’ and ‘online religion’; also ‘offline’ religion - the impact internet religion has on more conventional forms of practice and expression. As a new interface for mediating religious belief, ritual and ethical practice, and for constituting community and selfhood, the internet subverts and recasts not only these categories, but others such as ‘world religion’ and ‘minority religious group’. You don't have to be a large operation now to have a global reach - a democratization of religion is in progress.

“Frontier” is included in the general category of “limit” (limes: a road bordering a field). But what is at the origin of limit, frontier? An authority, a power that can exercise “the social function of ritual and social significance of the line, the limit whose ritual legitimizes passage, transgression” (Bourdieu, 1982, p. 121). The limit, a traced line, sets up an order that is not only spatial but temporal, since it not only separates a “this side” from a “that side” but also a “before” and an “after”. This dual nature of the limit is at work in the myth of the founding of Rome. Any limit, any frontier, is intentional: it proceeds from a will; it is never arbitrary. Its legitimacy was originally established by a religious ritual and later, by a political procedure.

How surprised the psychologists of the French army were when they discovered that Senegalese conscripts were more sensitive to the vicissitudes of the climate, and even to extreme heat, than the soldiers of “metropolitan” France; that they reacted to the least changes in the weather, and even to such barely discernible events as minute inflections of the voice. These warriors who had passed for brutes—these heroes—turned out to have the sensitivity of women. It is often said, and not without reason, that the Negro is a man of Nature. The African negro, whether peasant, fisherman, hunter or herdsman, lives outdoors, both off the earth and with it, on intimate terms with trees and animals and all the elements, and to the rhythm of seasons and days. He keeps his senses open, ready to receive any impulse, and even the very waves of nature, without a screen (which is not to say without relays or transformers) between subject and object. He does, of course, reflect; but what comes first is form and color, sound and rhythm, smell and touch.

Hail to the royal Kaicedrat! Hail to those who have invented nothing, To those who have explored nothing, To those who have subdued nothing, But abandoned themselves to the grip of the essence of every thing, Ignorant of the surface, but gripped by the movement of every thing, Not caring to subdue, but to play the game of the world.

The work of those scholars who see an implicit relationship between religion and violence has of late assumed greater prominence and relevance. For example, in a recent volume entitled Religion and Violence, Hent de Vries states: ‘[v]iolence … finds its prime model - its source, force, and counterforce - in key elements of the tradition called religious. It can be seen as the very element of religion. No violence without (some) religion; no religion without (some) violence (Vries, 2001: 1). He elaborates further: ‘“religion” is the relation between the self (or some selves) and the other - some Other … “religion” also stands for the other - the Other - of violence. It evokes its counter-image, its opposite, its redemption, and critique’ (ibid., my emphasis). Similarly, Bruce Lincoln, writing of the social and political processes that underpin cultural, especially religious, groups, states that ‘“culture” is the prime instrument through which groups mobilize themselves, construct their collective identity and effect their solidarity by excluding those whom they identify as outsiders, while simultaneously establishing their own internal hierarchy, based on varying degrees of adherence to the values that define the group and its members’ (Lincoln, 2000: 411, my emphasis).

The phenomenon of “possession” continues to elude satisfactory explanation because of the ambiguity of its nature. It belongs to one of those marginal zones where beliefs and rites are allied in the closest possible way to still obscure psychological mechanisms. We know that the phenomenon dates from antiquity, and that in numerous so-called primitive societies it is one of the means by which the faithful communicate with the supernatural. Our object is to offer a contribution to the clarification of this ambiguity by an analysis of the forms and functions of the trance in voodoo. This term, originating in Dahomey (in Fon, a voodoo is a god or spirit), denotes the ensemble of religious beliefs and practices observed on the fringes of Catholicism by the common people of Haiti. It is a syncretic religion in which elements from West Africa predominate, although other African cults have left their mark; however, this religious amalgam was impregnated from the beginning with Catholic beliefs and rites. The practice; of voodoo is not limited to Haiti. Under such names as macumba, candomblé, santeria, it is found in Brazil and in Cuba, where the Negroes, closer to the period of slavery, have conserved African traditions more completely than in Haiti. Observations made in Brazil can help to explain certain aspects of possession which, in Haiti, took an aberrant form.

In times of crisis, when democracies are under threat, our lessons of justice and equality are best learnt from those who are marginalized or oppressed. There could be hope for democracy if responses to the attacks of September 11, for example, were characterized not by blind revenge but by democratic solidarity. To think of democracy in terms of non-realized ideals does not adequately challenge the failures of its promises. ‘Not to respond’ is often a strategic necessity for democratic discourse, which recognizes failure as part of its evolutionist and utopian narrative. The internal dialectic of the unrealized finds in the negative instance of failure a strange moral coherence. Thus it is proposed to consider democracy as something de- realized rather than unrealized. The term ‘de-realized’ places the democratic experience at a distance, in a context not of its making, in order to de-familiarize it and to block its natural or normative reference. The idea is to see the potential of democracy in translation or in an extraterritorial sense. Democracy's potential lies not in its failure but in its frailty.

In 1957 American linguistics seemed to have reached a plateau of achievement and acceptance on which its practitioners could pause in retrospective pride. That year saw the publication, under the aegis of the American Council of Learned Societies, of a sampling of papers, edited by Martin Joos (Readings in Linguistics) and documenting, according to its subtitle, “The development of descriptive linguistics in America since 1925.” In a period of about five years around that date H. A. Gleason, Jr., Charles F. Hockett and Archibald A. Hill published textbooks which summarized and extended current views on linguistics, while another leading linguist, Kenneth L. Pike, summed up his considerable experience in a preliminary version of a major work on Language. In the same year there appeared a slim volume which was to have a startling impact on linguistics. Its author, Noam Chomsky, was a student of Zellig S. Harris who himself had codified the methods of structural linguistics in 1951 and was one of the leading proponents of the assumptions and goals of American linguistics attacked so sharply by its new critic. Truly a paradigm of the Hegelian myth of history.

The contemporary Chinese intellectual Kang Xiaoguang has argued that Chinese soft power should be based on Confucian culture, the most influential Chinese political tradition. But which Confucian values should form the core of China's soft power? This paper first explores the coexistence of state sovereignty and utopian cosmopolitanism through an analysis of Confucian tradition up to contemporary Chinese nationalism. It insists on the exogenous roots of the cosmopolitan ideal and its relations with the ideal of a harmonious political order and a global peace. Then, it compares the philosophy of ‘all-under-heaven’ in its classical and contemporary forms, with Mencius’ theory of a ‘hegemon’, a theory that still informs the moral language that Chinese intellectuals use to evaluate foreign policy, especially regarding morally-justified warfare. It ends on a reflection on the role that Mencius's theory of just and unjust war can play in the contemporary Chinese context and to help understanding and defining the stance of China in the international geo-political context.

It has been over two centuries since resemblance ceased to play in our culture a stable, adequate and autonomous role at the wellspring of knowledge. The classical age broke away from it. First Bacon, then Descartes established within our time a system of knowledge in which similitude no longer occupied more than a precarious and temporary place, on the border of illusion: “when we discover some resemblances between two things we ordinarily attribute what we have recognized as true of one only to the other as well, even aspects in which in reality they differ.” Since the 17th century the similar has offered no more to knowledge than an unstable countenance, ready to give way to knowledge, and it is the province of knowledge to determine immediately the identical and the different so that they appear one beside the other and are scrupulously distinguished.

The “modern” only begins to manifest itself when, in answer to the question, What is distinctively human?, Romanticism replies not by referring to man's eternal capacity for reason and universal rationality, but, ‘instead, to his creative originality, to his individuated capacity to feel and to dream uniquely. The modern begins to emerge when man is seen, not merely as a creature that can discover the world, but also as one who can create new meanings and values, and can thus change himself and fundamentally transform his world, rather than unearth, recover, or “mirror” an essentially unchanging world order.

In what sort of situation might someone ask the question “who are we?” It seems most appropriate in the mouth of someone trying to shape her audience into a more coherent community. It is the sort of rhetorical question a party leader might ask at a party rally. In such situations, it means something like “what unifying ideal can we find to make us less like a mob and more like an army, less like people thrown together by accident and more like people who have united to accomplish a task?”

Africa, along with Asia, is the continent with the highest number of ‘living’ indigenous languages. European languages, mainly English, French and Portuguese, have spread throughout all African nations during the last 200 years; however, until today, the use of these ‘foreign’ languages has been mostly restricted to certain domains, such as higher education, politics and business, and also to a relatively small number of people. According to Scotton (1982: 68) only 10 per cent or less of the rural African population have a considerable competence in the imported languages, even though these are in many instances the official languages of their home countries. African vernaculars are generally not in danger of being replaced by European languages. However, we observe a diminishing use of African vernaculars, not only in an increasing number of domains, but also with regard to the absolute number of indigenous languages; that means, in short, that linguistic vitality and variety on the African continent is decreasing.

Since the heroic age of Pierre Duhem, to whose amazing energy and learning we owe the revelation of medieval science, much work has been devoted to the study of that subject. The publication of the great works of Thorndyke and Sarton, and, in the last decade, of the brilliant studies of Anneliese Maier and Professor Marshall Clagett, not to mention countless other monographs and papers, has tremendously enlarged and enriched our knowledge and understanding of medieval science in its connection with medieval philosophy—toward whose understanding and knowledge even greater progress has been made—and of medieval culture in general.

The connection between static and dynamic forces in society became, once again, a topic for debate at the sociological congress held in Amsterdam in 1955. The reason for this renewed interest is not far to seek. Dynamic phenomena of great intensity force themselves on the observer of the contemporary scene. Within the Soviet sphere of influence, the structure of society is undergoing radical changes. At the same time, the Orient and all those areas said, not without reason, to be “developing,” are in the throes of modernization. And finally, even in countries ruled by liberalism and marked by stable institutions, the inner structure of such fundamental social concepts as “individual,” “family,” “stratification,” “organization” and “government” is rapidly being transformed. On the other hand, there are many countries in which society appears to be gravitating towards a static condition, characterized by Veblen more than fifty years ago, as a “new feudalism.” When all areas beyond the present-day borders of capitalism will have been industrialized, capitalism will no longer be able to rely on new resources elsewhere, and its economic expansion, which was once thought to be demanded by the very nature of the system, will have come to an end. Capitalism will then have to revert to simply reproducing itself. This prospect is reflected in our present-day culture. Thus, Olivier Messiaen, a composer of the group known as “La Jeune France,” said only recently, that the historical development of music had reached a ceiling beyond which no further development could be imagined; whether he was right or not, is not the point. What should be of most interest in a discussion of the conflict between static and dynamic forces, is the question which of these will prove to be the stronger; whether the trend of development prevailing since the Middle Ages will continue, or whether it will terminate in a state of paralysis of the kind that Himmler prophesied when he said that the Third Reich would last for ten or twenty thousand years, until the “end of modern times.” But before we can speculate about the outcome of the conflict between the static and dynamic, we must reflect on the ideas connected with them; otherwise it would be like trying to settle the course of world history by idly tossing a coin.

Our predecessors Pott, Miklosich, Woolner, Grierson, Jules Bloch, Barannikov, Ralph Turner and others, have established from diachronic facts (comparison of the Romany with the old Indian) the Indian origin of the Tsiganes, or Gypsies. Their divergencies originate from the exact place of the primitive homeland of the Gypsies, the majority inclining to the north-west of India.

Chinese culture is distinguished among the world's other great traditions by the depth and intensity of its love for rock and stone. This enduring passion manifests itself both in the art of garden making, where rocks form the frame and the central focus of the classical Chinese garden, and also on a smaller scale, in the practice of collecting stones to be displayed on trays or on scholars’ desks indoors. This essay sketches a brief history of lithophilia in China, then adduces the most important philosophical presuppositions for it, and concludes by suggesting some implications for our experience of, and interactions with, the realm of stone and rock.

One day a newly hatched eagle fell from its mother's clutches as she was flying over a chicken yard. The young eagle grew up in the chicken yard with young chickens and took on the habits, customs, and behavior of chickens. He ate like a chicken, walked like a chicken, and generally performed his daily routine like the birds who surrounded him. One day an eagle flew over the chicken yard, perhaps a parent eagle, looking for the lost eagle. Perched high on a tree's limb over-looking the chicken yard, the eagle saw the young eagle that had fallen out of its mother's clutches. The old eagle called to the young eagle, “Eagle, can you hear me?” The young eagle thought of himself as a chicken and did not respond to the call of the eagle in the tree. However, the old eagle continued to call out to him, “Eagle down there, hello.” Finally the eagle in the chicken yard thought, can that eagle in the tree be yelling to me? So he looked up at the tree and saw that the old eagle was beckoning to him to fly up to the tree's branch. The young eagle said, “I cannot fly. I am a chicken.” Insisting that he try to fly the old eagle said, “No, you are not a chicken you are an eagle and I know your parents, in fact, I am your mother and your father is waiting for me to bring you.”

The expression “République des lettress” is still used today. It appears in most recent dictionaries of the French language, and it even occasionally occurs in ordinary conversation or in the press, a pompous and ironic circumlocution to designate the Parisian literary “milieu.” This archaistic and pejorative survival masks (somewhat similarly to the word “rhetoric”) the attention that researchers are now according to the older meaning of this surviving expression, and to the concept of an international exchange of ideas that it represented for scholars of the Ancien Régime. As proof that this scientific interest is recent, Paul Hazard, in the famous Crise de la conscience européenne (1936), devotes not a single line to the “Republic of Letters,” while in the chapter dealing with Pierre Bayle he cites the “Nouvelles de la République des Lettres” (1684), the learned periodical published in Amsterdam by this erudite Calvinist, apparently without feeling a need to explain a title that seemed self-evident. For the history of ideas, this notion was not a subject for history. It resided outside the field of perception of a discipline that was completely devoted to a sort of chemistry of pure ideas, removed from the literary form that carried them, and a fortiori from institutional circuits, and forms of sociability and dialogue that “invent” and spread them, and even more so from the awareness that “scholars” might have had of the solidarity that united them and of the meaning they might be able to attribute to it.