In the last few decades, the subject of trust has become one of the central research topics in sociology and political science. Various theoretical approaches have crystallized, and an immense amount of empirical data has been collected. The focus on trust is for two kinds of reasons. One has to do with immanent developments in the social sciences. We have witnessed a turn from almost exclusive preoccupation with the macro-social level, that is the organizational, systemic or structuralist images of society, toward the micro-foundations of social life; that is, everyday actions and interactions, including their ‘soft’ dimensions, mental and cultural intangibles and imponderables. Another set of reasons has to do with the changing quality of social structures and social processes in the late-modern period. The ascendance of democracy means that the role of human agency is growing, and more depends on what common people think and do, how they feel toward others and toward their rulers and how they choose to participate and cooperate. The process of globalization means that more and more of the factors impinging on everyday life of people are non-transparent, unfamiliar and distant, demanding new type of attitudes. The expansion of risk means that people have to act more often than before in conditions of uncertainty. The traumas of rapid, comprehensive and often unexpected social change produce disorientation and a loss of existential security. If the ambition of sociology to become the reflexive awareness of society is to be realized, then the current interest in trust seems to be wholly warranted.

In December 2000, the political leaders of the EU met in Lisbon and announced that by the year 2010 the EU will be the most competitive, dynamic, knowledge-based economy. My first reaction was: ‘They don't know what they are talking about’. It sounded to me like the pep talk of a coach of a soccer team before a match he knows his team cannot win. It is difficult to promote good science. Patience is needed: at first the results are few and only after several years of consistent policy can the trickle grow into a stream. Patience is not one of the usual qualities of success-driven politicians. Recently (and wisely) our beloved leaders lowered their ambitions and adopted a new target: by 2010 all EU members will spend 3% of their GNP on research and development. This is promising, if the money is spent wisely. To do research at the highest level money is certainly needed, but brains and organisation are needed as well. In this paper I address the question: how does European research in astronomy compare with that in the USA?

Muslims and their critics tend to explain their differences in terms of Koranic teachings. But all practical precepts from holy scriptures are constantly contested. Most of these controversial practices concern the position of women in the family and in society at large; they derive not so much from religion as from the traditions of patriarchal, pre-industrial society the world over. Tensions between men and women, parents and children have much increased due to the recent educational revolution that now has girls competing on equal terms with boys for diplomas and jobs, both in their countries of origin and in the countries of immigration. As a result, many men attempt to cling to their superior position by invoking a patriarchal interpretation of the holy book and many women avoid a full confrontation out of loyalty to their men, their faith and their group origins.

On 20 June 2006 a new museum in Paris opened its doors for the first time, the Musée du Quai Branly. President Jacques Chirac inaugurated the museum in front of an audience that included, among others, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and France's most famous anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. The museum is another enrichment of that fabulous city, already so well endowed with museums and monuments.

The Fifth Republic, founded by General de Gaulle in 1958, has been extraordinarily successful in the creation of new museums. De Gaulle himself did not feel the need to have a special museum built in order to commemorate him. He may have thought that he would be remembered anyway, and he was right. But he certainly stimulated French culture and had Paris embellished in many respects. His famous Minister of Culture André Malraux not only ordered the cleaning up of the blackened façades of many Paris monuments and other buildings, but also actively stimulated cultural activities outside Paris or, as the French say, in the provinces. Malraux also took a great interest in non-Western art and in this way helped the founding of the Quai Branly museum. De Gaulle's successor, Georges Pompidou, was of course the source of inspiration for the Museum of Modern Art, also known as the Centre Pompidou and particularly famous for its revolutionary architecture. Another less extravagant but also rightly famous building is the Institut du Monde Arabe which dates from the late 1980s and was built by Jean Nouvel, the architect who also built the Quai Branly Museum.

The processes of research proposals and evaluation have become ever more elaborate, but the system remains primitive. This paper argues for a fresh look at existing practices, with a view to developing less onerous and more efficient systems.

Although inquiry in philosophy and some social sciences has attended closely to the question of how investigators use language to describe and explain phenomena of interest, less attention has been devoted to questions of language use in psychological science. This essay explores language use in a major subfield of psychology, the psychology of personality. We identify three descriptive and explanatory languages in the field and critique them from the perspective of scholarship outside of psychology that has explored language use. We conclude with a call for greater exchange between investigators who embrace discursive accounts of persons and social action, and those who posit social-cognitive accounts of the knowledge that individuals use when they create discourse in their efforts to understand the world and to direct their experiences and actions.

The individual characteristics of leaders and voters have assumed great importance in modern political discourse. Pervasive media influence points to leaders' personality as an anchor around which political information is organized in drawing in and/or deterring the electorate's preferences. Voters' traits, values and perceptions of politicians are no less important than traditional socio-demographic characteristics such as gender, age, educational level, occupation and income in explaining political preferences. Recent findings suggest that politics is becoming personalized, as political choices increasingly depend on voters' personality. More specifically, voters' distinctive pattern of habits, attitudes and values, serve as a compass that grants coherence to their own preferences and that helps them make sense of politicians' behaviour.

There is very much more to Daniel Defoe's inspired piece of ‘faction’ about Robinson Crusoe than seeing it just as a boy's adventure story. Its influence was widespread, judging by the great scale of new editions and reprintings, both internationally and through many translations. It can be read as a sophisticated myth of the ascent of man, of economic growth by dint of the work ethic, of the imperative of ‘improvement’ and the determination to master nature. It has implications for natural rights theory, the Lockeian justification of private property and the role of the ‘civilised’ European facing a hostile, alien habitat.

During the 20th century, Economic History grew into one of the main sub-disciplines of the Historical and Economic Sciences. Its roots can be traced back to the 18th and 19th centuries: mercantilists as well as classical economists, and later the German and English Historical Schools, they all were already using economic-historical data to support their reflections and theories. During the inter-war period, quantification was added as an analytical tool. Immediately after the Second World War, research focused mainly on macro-economic problems, with some American scholars during this period introducing a ‘New Economic History’, Cliometrics. From the mid-1970s onwards, the interest shifted increasingly to micro-economic questions, to be interpreted as a positive movement. The shift, indeed, creates a potential for a future combination of macro- and micro-approaches in Economic History. Such a combination would stimulate the integration of the three main variables of economic life and development (structure, hazard and freedom) into a more meaningful explanatory synthesis.

Conflicts between science and religion, autonomous reason and divine revelation seem to continue in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim heritage and traditions. This holds true both in the secular West and in the Muslim East, in the scientifically and technologically most advanced societies as well as in the scientifically and technologically most backward cultures and countries. This article reviews some of the problems and issues involved in this persistent conflict, and tries to deal with the question of why such disputes and controversies arise in the first place in scientifically very weak Muslim societies.

Historical inquiry today is robust at multiple levels and celebrates novel interpretation and the rich complexity of the past. Although historians show no signs of paralysis in the light of the epistemological challenges of the 1980s and 1990s, many remain disillusioned with traditional periodization schemes. In the case of the Scientific Revolution, this skittishness seems to translate into a sceptical resignation about the possibility that the new scholarship can ever reveal an underlying coherence. As the essays in this forum on the Scientific Revolution demonstrate, however, such resignation is an inadequate response to novelty and complexity. New findings ought to prod historians to search for more intricate and satisfactory patterns.

The crisis in academic publishing has reached a point where young scholars in many fields of the humanities may no longer be able to communicate their research in the time-honoured manner – that is, in the form of a traditional codex printed by a university press. Sooner or later, most monographs will probably have to be published on the Internet. What form will they take? Atentative answer to that question is provided by a sketch for an electronic book about publishing and the book trade in 18th-century France.

Homer is considered the father of poetry in European culture, but the written Greek text of the Iliad and the Odyssey was for ages not available in modern Europe, and knowledge of Greek was almost completely lost. Homer entered European classrooms during the 19th century. The popularity of the Iliad and the Odyssey coincided with the creation of modern educational systems in European empires and nation-states. At the end of the 19th century Homer was considered perfect reading material for the formation of the future elite of the British Empire. In the course of the 20th century teachers and pedagogues became increasingly accustomed to perceive Homer and his society as totally different from our times. All reading of Homer is contemporary reading.

During 19th century there was a migration of angels from their usual places in religion, art, and literature into the field of natural sciences. In works of Carus, Fechner and Exner, angels became objects of physiology, comparative anatomy, and astronomy. Although traditionally angels are considered as images or materialisations of pure mind, respectively of metaphysical/transcendental elements, such empirical methods of dealing with heavenly creatures have several precursors in history. This article discusses the traces of angels within the history of knowledge and arts as a specific dialectic of secularisation, focusing on the metamorphosis of heavenly creatures into representatives of the miraculous in 18th century aesthetics. Concerning the issue of representation, the article analyses the disappearance of materiality of painting through techniques of reproduction as prerequisites to transform the angels into objects of experimental research in 19th century sciences. As a result, the angels may be interpreted as symptoms of the problem of visualisation within a context where sciences have to address the boundaries of positivistic methods, for instance as a historical example for the epistemological problems of brain imaging.

Since the establishment of the World Trade Organization, one of its pillars, the TRIPs Agreement, has been exposed to strong criticism. The main objection being that TRIPs works against the interest of the developing world. This criticism will be examined against the empirical data showing the actual economic development in developing countries, with a special focus on China and India. As those data reveal, the developing countries are to be viewed as beneficiaries of the new world economic order, of which TRIPs is an instrumental and integral part. To avoid frictions in international trade, it is, however, essential that all WTO Members strictly comply with all of their obligations, be it under TRIPs, GATT 1994, or other WTO instruments. Weakening of intellectual property rights is counterproductive.

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Scientific Revolution came to be understood as a key period in Western history. Recently, historians have cast doubt upon this category, questioning whether the relevant institutions and practices of the seventeenth century are similar enough to modern science to warrant the label ‘scientific’. A central focus of their criticisms has been the identity of natural philosophy – the major discipline concerned with the study of nature in the early modern period – and its differences from modern science. This paper explores natural philosophy and its relation to philosophy more generally. It concludes that a significant philosophical revolution took place in the seventeenth century, and that this was important for the subsequent emergence of modern science.

This paper reviews some recent trends in the natural and biomedical sciences related to issues of complexity and reductionism, mathematical modelling and simulations, with particular reference to system biology, and discusses the impact of these developments on future research training.

The importance of the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century has been queried in recent years and this paper attempts to show why the notion is still essential to a proper understanding of the twin advance in scientific conceptualization and factual discovery that began in the sixteenth century and led through such figures as Galileo to the new world view of Isaac Newton. The significance of the scholastic tradition, hermeticism and alchemy is not denied, but the major breakthrough that catapulted Europe into the modern age was the outcome of new conceptual tools and a fresh outlook on nature.

At the time of writing, more than 20 novels have been written that deal directly or indirectly with the events of 9/11. In broad outlines, they fall under four categories: the novel of recuperation, the novel of first-hand witnessing, the great New York novel, and the novel of the outsider. It is the last category of novels – written by non-Americans – that demonstrates the extent to which 11 September has penetrated deep into the European psyche and thus has become a European event. What is surprising is that the gap between the continents seems smaller in fiction than in politics. Even Luc Lang's onze septembre mon amour, a strident anti-American screed, is characterized by a sense of solidarity for the victims and for an alternative America, antithetical to the official one. In Frédéric Beigbeder's Windows on the World (a French novel with an English title), Europe and the US remain united in the overarching concept of the West, sharing a common destiny. In Ian McEwan's Saturday, finally, the events in the US have become part and parcel of the protagonist's existence, even though he lives thousands of miles away in the posh part of London.

What kind of social arrangements pave the best way for a prosperous future in Europe? How should business systems, welfare schemes and labour markets be structured? Debating the future political path of the EU, the union leadership is launching a modernised ‘European social model’ as a major element of a renewed policy agenda. In addition, a growing body of research literature draws on the notion of social models when comparing institutions and performance in different industrialised countries. Besides confronting policymakers' self-confident declarations that a prosperous future is attainable if only societal institutions are modelled in accordance with one or another expert formula, there is a need for probing the potential, problematic exchange between social science research on social models and the way that use is made of them by policymakers. By assembling different academic expertise, the objective of this Focus is thus to contribute to a discussion around social models, economic prosperity, social justice, and political legitimacy in a way that is relevant for social science, public debate and policymaking.