The prophets of gloom and the champions of progress are never done trying to discourage or inspire us with their various prognostications. Surveys show that fewer books are being read and Libraries find their budgets are increasingly being eaten up by subscriptions to ever more expensive periodicals. With electronic publication, collective authorship may seem to replace the individual writer. Furthermore, there is not, as yet, any adequate control over the veracity and reliability of information put up on the Internet.

For most of the Middle Ages, diurnal timekeeping depended on sundials, water-clocks, and occasionally flame-clocks. However, towards the end of the thirteenth century, the mechanical clock, weight driven and regulated by a verge escapement and foliot mechanism, was developed. The earliest mechanical clocks appeared in Northern Italy but rapidly spread throughout Europe. In Jacques le Goff’s words, ‘Henceforth the clock became the measure of all things’. Early clocks were neither particularly accurate nor reliable, but the machine, because it was better than anything that had preceded it, acquired the reputation for perfect regularity and dependability. This paper seeks to show how the clock came to be regarded as a model and a reference point, invoked by writers in relation to the ordering of the universe, the nature of a well-regulated society, and as an image of proper moral behaviour.

The article draws attention to a number of research initiatives in the area of liturgical plainchant, which have brought together scholars of different countries and disciplines. The number of primary sources is so great that cooperation is essential. In the first phase of modern scientific research, monks of the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes played a crucial role, their combined efforts being rivalled by very few individual scholars. In the last quarter of a century, databases and computerized projects have been developed to which scholars from different countries can contribute and from which they can draw information, and these have to some extent replaced earlier communal efforts. When the seemingly uniform facade of plainchant is inspected closely it resolves itself into a multitude of overlapping traditions and styles: how many and how widespread they are can only be determined through international cooperation. Later stylistic phases, especially from the eleventh century onward, are influenced by a preoccupation with music as an aural reflection of the harmony of the universe.

Most empirical studies of social stratification and inequality remain confined to the micrological level, while their very aim is to construct and to test macrological statements. The first part of this paper discusses the main hypotheses that are implicit in this research tradition and that do not allow the transition from micro to macro. Based on recent findings in this field, the second part outlines a macrosociological theory of stratification, which allows the possibility of deducing micro as well as macro propositions that remain unexplainable by micrological theories.

There are basically three stories about the globalization– welfare state nexus. The first story argues that globalization is the cause of the chronic crisis of the welfare state. The second maintains that whatever the cause of the welfare state crisis, globalization is not part of it. The third story holds that globalization, far from causing the welfare state’s troubles, is a consequence of these troubles and part of their solution. The paper reviews each of these stories and traces their intellectual origins.

The story goes that in the 1980s and 1990s no publisher in Paris was prepared to issue a historical study that did not have the word ‘memory’ in the title. Identity, a congener of memory, was equally popular in the same period. One of the experts in the field, John Gillis, claimed that identity has become no more than a cliché and that memory has lost a lot of its precision, but both terms have remained key concepts. ‘The core meaning of any individual or group identity, namely, a sense of sameness over time and space, is sustained by remembering; and what is remembered is defined by the assumed identity’. Memories and identities are anything but certain facts; they are `representations or constructions of reality, subjective rather than objective phenomena. […] “Memory work” is, like any kind of physical or mental labor, embedded in complex class, gender and power relations that determine what is remembered (or forgotten), by whom, and for what end”.

It has been suggested that the demise of the vainglorious future-orientated ideologies in the late 1980s brought about a shift in focus towards the past. However that may be, the wave of interest in memory did receive an enormous impulse from one of the most controversial studies in this field, the seven-volume series Les Lieux de Mémoire (1984–1992), published under the direction of the French historian Pierre Nora. In the last volume he argued that France had gradually disappeared as a ‘memory nation’; the national memory had been supplanted by a series of lieux de mémoire and the conflicting social identities that this entailed. La France, according to Nora, had entered the ‘era of commemoration’ as Les Frances as a result of what he called a ‘democratization of the commemorative spirit’.

The relation between national identity and collective memory is highlighted by the many commemorative events organised in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1980, the French, British and Brazilian governments had a Year of National Heritage, while in Israel a ‘memory industry’ specially devoted to the Holocaust got under way.

France, Belgium and the Netherlands faced the same fundamental challenge in 1945. In spite of differences in institutional setting, chronology or demography, their experience of Nazi occupation had been traumatizing and humiliating. Their national reconstruction required a self-confident image of the recent past. Nonetheless, the contours of the policies of memory pursued in the three countries diverged in a striking measure. In the Netherlands, post-war governments deliberately constructed a forced national consensus around the myth of a unanimous resistance, at the expense of veterans’ movements and all forms of associative memory. However, the latter dominated the commemorations in France and Belgium, continuing a post-1918 tradition. The conflicts between different categories of war veterans and victims and between different political families characterized the conflicting memories in these two countries. Rather than a monolithic resistance myth, different memories of Nazi persecution were rivals for public attention. In France, neither de Gaulle nor the Communist party succeeded in monopolizing the heroic legacy of the resistance. In Belgium, the Royal question, the left–right divide and subsequently the regional tensions between French and Dutch speakers, estranged part of opinion from the memory of the resistance and even ended up favouring, in some quarters, the rehabilitation of collaboration with the Nazi occupier.

Commonly, the second half of the 1960s is considered to be the period in which Western Germany actually started dealing with its National-Socialist past. The youth of that time is said to have opened the discussion and to have broken taboos by asking the elder generation probing questions and by exposing the careers of former National-Socialists in the politics and society of post-war Germany (the FRG). I make clear that this picture is very one-sided and I also give an overview on the different ways Western Germany coped with this past between 1945 and the end of the 1980s. Of course, these ways differed strongly over the years, but the ‘Third Reich’ has always remained present in German historical awareness and is branded into German identity – for better or for worse.

We examine the strata of memory in Japan’s recollections of the wartime experience and explore the shaping and releasing of memory in Japan, seeking to penetrate and recover individual Japanese experience. Individual memories that seemed tightly contained, when released were told with great emotional intensity and authenticity. That there has been little public discourse does not mean that individual Japanese have forgotten that war, but that the conflict – a war with no generally accepted name or firmly fixed start or end – seems disconnected from the private memories of the wartime generation. Japan was defeated thoroughly and completely, and in the history of memory we see no well-established narrative form for telling the tale of the defeated. In Japan's public memory of the war, War itself is often the enemy, and the Japanese its victims. Such a view is ahistorical and unsatisfactory to nations and peoples throughout Asia and the Pacific. The prevailing myths during Japan's war, developed and fostered over 15 years of conflict, and the overwhelming weight of more than three million war dead on the memories of the living forged a link between a desire to honour and cherish those lost and the ways the war is recalled in the public sphere. Enforced and encouraged by government policies and private associations, protecting the dead has become a means of avoiding a full discussion of the war. The memorials and monuments to the Dead that have been created throughout Japan, Asia, and the Pacific stand silent sentry to a Legend of the war. This must be challenged by the release into the public sphere of living memories of the War in all their ambiguity, complexity, and contradiction without which Japan’s Memory can have no historical veracity. Moreover, the memories of the Second World War of other peoples can never be complete without Japan’s story.

In the Soviet Union, the ‘Great Patriotic War’ was both a uniquely traumatic ordeal that took the lives of approximately 30 million people, and the focus of a decades-long myth and cult that celebrated the most glorious achievement of the Soviet era. At the war’s end, Stalin, whose mistakes and brutality had greatly increased Soviet war losses, sought to obscure popular memories of the war experience, but the Brezhnev regime turned an idealized memory of the Great Patriotic War into the focus of an elaborate cult. As the Soviet Union declined and finally expired, the memory of the war became highly contested, as ugly truths about the war were made public. Today the war myth lives on as evidence of Stalin’s inhuman rule, and as a source of Russian national pride and patriotism.