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.

Let me begin by quoting the headings of a few articles. ‘Americans feel lonely in an angry world’, ‘Alliance in a troubled mood’, or ‘I wonder whether cool heads still prevail’. The first and the third articles were published in 1980, the second in 1981. So we have been here before.

The first Institute for Advanced Study was founded in Princeton, New Jersey in 1930. Several other institutes followed, both in America, Europe and, more recently, in Asia and Africa. This paper is not a history of such institutes, but is about the idea of an Institute for Advanced Study. Like John Henry Newman in his famous book, The Idea of a University, it offers some general reflections on education, science and art and their interrelationship. It underlines the importance of these institutes in an academic world increasingly dominated by notions of measured output and impact and of policies imposed from ‘above’.

Good science and good journalism have much in common. They both aim for knowledge generation and knowledge dissemination for the benefit of societies – at least at their best. However, beyond this common ground, there is much room for difference and conflict. In this paper I will draw up an admittedly personal list of ten obvious areas of annoyance about how the media present the results of scientific research – of course, only some of the media and only sometimes! These areas of annoyance all derive from the relentless pressure on all media competing in the marketplace to catch the attention of their customers. However, while listing these ‘sins’, as it were, one readily notices that exactly the same may also be the major strengths of how science can be publicized in the media, and above all in TV, the most powerful of the media in our changing world of global communication. Science reporting will have to change and actively face these challenges. It needs to focus future science presentation in new directions, e.g. by making use of the emotional public appeal connected with science fiction, scandals, public hysteria and the arts. What is most important now and in the future is that whatever is presented about the scientific understanding of the world, should be presented in a way that makes such enlightened understanding accessible, above all, to young – and even very young – people. After all, it is they who are humanity's future and not the ageing war-horses of the sciences or of the media.

Historians have long found it difficult to deal with fascism as a generic, Europe-wide, political phenomenon. The historiographic pendulum has swung from including virtually every right-wing movement under the label of fascism to denying altogether that generic fascism ever existed. Neither approach is historically valid. The fascists did not see themselves as a species of Conservatives; they looked upon themselves as a unique, international political phenomenon. Moreover, many of their non-fascist contemporaries accepted this claim. Both were right and, for this reason, it is necessary to renew efforts to delineate the ideological and stylistic parameters of generic fascism. An important aid in understanding fascism as a generic phenomenon is the analysis of the relations between the German Nazis and French and Dutch fascists in the years from 1933 to 1939, a topic that has been little studied until now.

This paper sets out the limitations of knowledge from the past and the ways that knowledge can be used. The first part deals with the extent to which the past can be known and raises questions about the survival of evidence and also about the ways evidence is interpreted. The second part looks briefly at possible uses of the past and suggests, in particular, the importance of new interpretations challenging the received wisdom and thus giving societies new ways of looking at themselves and their histories.

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 ascendancy of proportional representation as the electoral system of choice, and pervasive concerns with the demographic representativeness of parliaments, both testify to the importance that is attached to ‘descriptive’ or ‘microcosmic’ representation in politics, despite persistent doubts about its desirability. This paper makes three points. First, representation as representativeness presupposes the existence of stable and meaningful social or political collectivities, which can be reflected in the composition of parliament, and this condition is undermined by the general trend towards individualization, which can be observed throughout Western Europe. Second, this trend necessitates a conceptualization of political representation not as a state, but as a dynamic relationship between the citizen and the representative. This relationship can be characterized both by its direction (from below or from above), and by the moment at which popular control is exercised (before or after the representative's period in office). Third, it is argued that both growing uncertainty about citizen preferences and the transformation of political parties into para-statal agencies push towards representation from above; and that both growing unpredictability of the political agenda and European integration push towards ex-post popular control. These developments call for greater attention to mechanisms of accountability in representative democracies.

This Introduction was written in November 2002, when the 16th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party was being held where more than 2000 delegates (representing 66 million Party members) decided on future policies and changes in the leadership. The way these decisions were prepared and endorsed reminds us how China differs from Western democracies. However, apart from the political structures, to what extent is China different?

The following five essays, all written by Chinese scholars, allow us a glimpse into contemporary Chinese culture through informative reports on philosophy, cultural studies, fiction, gender construction and women's poetry, and traditional Chinese medicine. Of course, these articles are far from covering all aspects, or even all major aspects, of Chinese culture, yet they offer us views of specific areas by experts who, from their insiders' vantage points, lead us into the heart of the intellectual debate in contemporary China.

Although the authors of these essays, with few exceptions, hesitate to generalize on present conditions and possible future scenarios, their arguments have something in common and suggest, perhaps unknowingly, important clues for understanding Chinese culture. When reading these essays, I am struck by the following, recurrent aspects.

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.

This essay recounts the career of Jacques-Pierre Brissot, the leader of the Girondists during the French Revolution, in a manner designed to pose questions about the nature of historical research in general. How, in piecing together information taken from scraps of paper, do historians come to an understanding of other lives? Put in the abstract, the problem belongs to epistemology or ethics. Confronted in practice, it is more like the puzzles uncovered by archaeologists. The historian digs out a shard of evidence from the archives and asks: was Brissot, the ultimate idealist, a spy for the police? By stepping in and out of layers of time, the historian is actually playing a deeper game, one that he or she may be reluctant to admit.

Numerous outbreaks of a disease whose most prominent effects were gangrene and loss of limbs occurred in Europe in the Middle Ages. Sufferers sought relief at the shrine of St Anthony at Vienne in France. Quite early, it was recognized that the disease was a poisoning due to the consumption of bread prepared from rye contaminated with the fungus ergot. Many interesting substances have been isolated from ergot, some of which are used in medicine in migraine and in childbirth, but the most dramatic substance derived from ergot is LSD. The circumstance of some of these discoveries is recounted.

The present state of the study of philosophy in China cannot be understood if the introduction of Western philosophy, including Marxism, in the early decades of the 20th century is ignored. During the first half of the past century, philosophy flourished at Peking University with a heavy emphasis on social and political theory, as well as at Tsinghua University, which focused more on professionalization of the discipline, logic, epistemology and the history of philosophy. From 1957 to 1979, philosophical studies suffered severely under an increasingly unfavourable political climate. It is only recently that departments of philosophy have been reconstructed, not only in Beijing but also in all major universities. Like their colleagues in other disciplines, many philosophers are nowadays struggling with the dichotomy between the old and the new, the Chinese and the Western tradition, and resisting an uncritical absorption of Western ideas. Finally, some observations are made on the lectures that Jürgen Habermas gave in China in 2001.

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.

In recent historiography, it has been argued that the expansion of Europe between 1500 and 1800 created a ‘system’ in the Atlantic by which the economies of Europe, West Africa and the New World were closely interconnected by trade and migration. However, the available evidence suggests that the economic implications of such a system were of marginal importance. Rather than boosting the economy, the ‘Atlantic System’ stimulated the expansion of European values and norms, such as private property, monogamy, the nuclear family, free labour and the place of women and children in society.

John Rawls construed the Theory of Justice as central to political philosophy, and defended a series of purportedly egalitarian versions of such a theory. This essay points out that Rawls' philosophy became increasingly influential during precisely that period in recent history – the last quarter of the 20th century – in which global inequality increased most dramatically, and explores some possible explanations of this peculiar fact. It concludes by arguing that methodological defects make his approach fundamentally misguided: early versions of his theory are too abstract to be of relevance to understanding politics or as guides to action, and later ones too parochial.

This essay deals with cultural studies, including elite culture and its products (literature and the performing arts), as well as studies of film and TV and other expressions of popular culture in the mainland of China. It lays particular emphasis on the currently prevailing concept of Cultural Studies introduced from the West at the beginning of the 1990s. The author addresses the following issues: how Cultural Studies was introduced into the Chinese context, how it was integrated with existing practices of cultural history and comparative literature studies, how it was institutionalized in China, and how it was developing into a position from where it can engage in a dialogue with Western scholarship against the background of increasing globalization. According to the author, Cultural Studies has much in common with literary studies, especially in the Chinese context. Therefore, these two branches of learning should not necessarily be seen as opposed to one another. Literary and cultural studies are complementary rather than exclusionary towards each other.

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.

Weimar Germany was a great period in scientific development in which Jews played a prominent role. However, Nazi anti-Jewish policies led to the dismissal of many staff members and directors of the institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, who were forced to go abroad. In their new environment they became major leaders in science – notably in the new branches such as molecular biology – with a continuing loss to Germany.

Institutes for Advanced Study provide havens for advancing scholarship, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, and have increased in number in recent years. The article explores the reasons for this development.