‘Morality and slavery’ argues that, as much as detachment and dispassion govern standard historical practice, historians cannot escape making moral judgments. Precisely because slavery is a morally charged subject, its history has been especially prone to changing points of view, traceable, for example, in recent histories of the slave trade and the controversy over Olaudah Equiano's birthplace. Various polar extremes – the structural coerciveness of slavery versus the agency of slaves; the persistence of African ethnicities versus rapid creolization; the spread of slavery versus the rapid growth of anti-slavery in the early republic – are evident in historical interpretations, which necessarily involve complicated value judgments and serious moral ramifications. The essay concludes by suggesting that a measure of balance and fairness has been possible in the study of slavery. Through empathy, historians have been able to recover, in part at least, the hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares, notions of right and wrong among both slaves and masters in previous epochs.

At least as far back as the reign of Tsar Nicholas I, Russia's state bureaucracy has been widely considered to be top-heavy, corrupt, inefficient and tyrannical. By the early twentieth century the real driving force of Russian history and society was neither the constitutional façade erected by the autocracy to stifle the revolution nor the subsequent Bolshevik seizure of power, but rather the growth of the state bureaucracy. Similarly, in the course of the twentieth century, analysts on both the left and the right came to view hyper-bureaucratic growth unchecked by democratic constraint as the major problem of Soviet society. Attempts to reduce bureaucratic interference in the economy of post-Soviet Russia have not resulted in positive change.

Drawing upon Gidden’s theory of structuration, the works of Castells and Polish intercultural education, the author focuses on the relationship between installing in future teachers what we will call a ‘reflective identity’ and the creation of a new educational and social reality, thus contributing to transforming the whole social structure.

What were the main characteristics of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Hungarian collective identity and memory political debates? They were no longer determined by the discourse of liberal-rights-extending assimilation, yet public speech was also not entirely determined by the ethnicist–essentialist subject matter of the interwar national characterology discourse; rather, the internal dilemma of the rights-extending assimilation was externalized. There were some who sought to advance the extension of rights in the direction of suffrage. Others held on to rights extension in the hope of assimilation and believed they could promote it through establishing institutions of public education. Others abided by rights-extending assimilation, but interpreted it in terms of individual cultural achievements. Yet others believed that their fears of historical Hungary falling apart and the decay of the national middle class could be counterbalanced by curtailing or revoking nationalities’ rights and exclusionary policies against them. This article focuses on four different types of forging a collective identity: programmes, master narratives, political languages, strategies and regimes of memory.

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 collapse of the Iron Curtain, and recent European enlargement have brought about new waves of intra-European migration. Whilst millions of people from Central and Eastern European countries have trodden the well-worn path to the West in search of better paid jobs, their migration trajectories have differed from traditional patterns. They very often work in host countries and simultaneously maintain close social links with their countries of origin, thus earning the label ‘pendulum migrants’. These pendulum movements can be perceived as agents that stimulate processes of social integration at the micro level. Contrary to popular discourse, which represents migration as a phenomenon endangering social cohesion, this article investigates how personal contacts between hosts and guests may contribute to the building of mutual trust between European citizens.

Hierarchy has properties of symmetry and scale. All that is related to hierarchy provides important perspectives on many other domains. The primary focus here is on renowned psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte Blanco’s Bi-Logic. Bi-Logic relates to the two modes of being, respectively symmetry and asymmetry in thought and reasoning and brain processes, in unconscious and in conscious modes of being. Some further consequences and implications are noted. These include relevance and potential in social sciences; in qualitative as well as quantitative literary analysis, and content analytics of text, speech, visual recording, and so on; in security and forensics; and in the contemporary theme of research and development relating to Big Data analytics.

The special value of radio astronomy lies in the probing of extreme conditions in the universe, including the highest energies and the lowest temperatures. Radio waves can penetrate clouds of gas and dust to reveal objects in the universe and, in particular, in our Galaxy that cannot be seen by visible light. To achieve the highest resolution, radio telescopes in widely separate parts of our globe combine their reception to produce a synthesized image. This is a splendid example of international collaboration. Among the images visualized are pulsars, derived from the remnants of supernovae explosions, and quasar sources powered by black holes.

This paper focuses on the reconstruction of social identity in which Polish pendulum migrants to Belgium engage, and pays specific attention to the civic components of this process. Social identity is here understood as an interactional, changing, and contextual phenomenon. Migration means being in a world in which neighbouring families and surrounding actors represent completely different cultures with different customs, traditions and lifestyles. The reconstruction of identity is an essential condition for adaptation and assimilation in the new place of settlement. This process of identity reconstruction, based on changes in stereotypes, is linked with the acceptance of pluralism as an important feature of the socio-cultural reality. The acceptance of a pluralist world brings migrants to a wider tolerance of diversity. This paper examines different circumstances of the processes mentioned in concrete empirical reality.

Medieval sagas of Icelanders are considered one of the most significant ‘contributions made by Nordic culture’,1 among ‘the great marvels of world literature […] so timelessly up-to-date’ and characterised by ‘a supreme, undistorted sense of actuality’.2 ‘We will never comprehend’, the famous novelist Milan Kundera said, ‘the significance of the fact that the first grand, enormous body of prose composed in a European national language sprang from the genius of a very small nation, perhaps the smallest in Europe … the glory of the sagas is indisputable’.1,2 What follows is an attempt to make comprehensible some of the aesthetic mechanisms through which the sagas attain their remarkable representational complexity. This is not in order to diminish the glory of the genius that Kundera refers to – the genius of the people and the many geniuses from among the people – but rather to appreciate it even more, as usually results from a deeper understanding of the workings of things.

The 20th century saw the establishment of the first quantitative theory seeking to describe the behaviour of the Universe as a whole – the Big Bang. This sets up a framework within which there has been great success in interpreting a wide range of observations, including the abundances of light chemical elements, the existence and spectrum of the cosmic microwave radiation, and the formation and evolution of galaxies. At the end of the 20th century, the surprising conclusion of the Big Bang theory is that 95% of the Universe is made of two different unknown types of material whose nature remains unclear: dark matter and dark energy. Needless to say, this is a major challenge for science. At the beginning of the 21st century, cosmology appears poised to enter a high-precision era, where the key quantities of cosmology will be determined to two or more significant figures. If cosmologists are on the right track, this will confirm the existence of dark matter and dark energy; if not, it will force us to revise our current picture of the Universe. Either way, the prospect is for exciting years ahead in cosmology.

When the grandfather of modern economics, Adam Smith, was preparing his Wealth of Nations almost a quarter of a millennium ago, the workforce of businesses would typically be counted in single or double figures. Now the world's biggest firms, such as Wal-Mart, have a payroll of well over a million, bigger than the population of some entire nations. This paper reviews some of the reasons for this growth, and considers whether it might continue forever. Powerful evidence exists of potential scale economies, in business functions from R&D to finance, and industries from pin production to pharmaceuticals. And these do indeed translate into remarkable performance records for some industrial giants. But surprisingly, on average, bigger firms do not enjoy above average profitability and, on the whole, giant firms are not gaining on the world economy. This paper reviews some of the market and managerial constraints on size, and considers innovative efforts – ranging from the New Zealand dairy industry to the McDonald's chain – to reconcile global-level scale economies in some functions with local autonomy in others. In passing, the paper notes a disturbing array of incentives tempting some managers to expand their empire, even when that is not in the shareholders' interest.

In the pre-globalization era, when communication between nations was difficult and infrequent, and direct (experiential) or indirect (textual-descriptive) knowledge was scant, images of ‘foreign countries’ were frequently constructions based on inadequate information. As a result, fictional descriptions and images were the primary source for people to gain some knowledge of other nations. However, beginning with the great voyages of discovery of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, we began to step into an age of globalization, which generated the diversification of ‘source texts’ in this regard. Today, the emergence of new media has accelerated and proliferated such diversity. These new media texts now play a dominant role in forming the image of other countries, to some degree replacing traditional fictional texts. The basic presuppositions of comparative literature imagology have changed accordingly. Starting from the core concept of ‘images’, this paper discusses why it is necessary to integrate imagology, with ‘semiotic images’ as core concept, and ‘communications research’.

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.

Post-war German historiography is an interesting example of changing norms and the problem of satisfying a balance between explanation and (moral) judgement. Whereas national historians of Imperial Germany could feel in harmony with History, defeat and the peace of Versailles destroyed the belief in historical justice, so the bulk of the craft sympathized with Hitler's policy, although not always with his methods. The fall of the Third Reich and the revelation of its crimes caused a deep crisis of historical consciousness and attempts to deny or belittle personal responsibility and cooperation. After the 1960s however, a generation took over who could internalize the democratic norms and, through that, closed the gap between German and Western historiography. With the next generation after the reunification, critical revisionism of the national past even increased in so far as it included the first wave of post-war historiography with its apologetic tendencies. Historiography so became a striking example of a thorough national metamorphosis.

In our quest of a new paradigm for cultural or cross-cultural understanding, we must first take a look at the very concept of a paradigm, as Thomas Kuhn expounded in his celebrated book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and the related concepts of incommensurability and untranslatability. Kuhn’s concepts have a significant influence on social sciences and the humanities, and they put an overemphasis on the difference and the impossibility of communication among different groups and cultures. Such a tendency has led to the fragmentization of the social fabric and the resurgence of a most tenacious tribalism. This essay launches a critique of such concepts and argues for the possibility and validity of cross-cultural understanding, and proposes world literature as an opportunity to embrace cross-cultural translatability as the first step towards a new paradigm in the study of different cultures in our globalized world today.

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.

Party ‘federations’ have begun to exist in the European Union, but these are not ‘parties’ in the true sense of the word. They are beginning to exercise some influence, not just in the European Parliament but, to an extent at least, on the European Commission and on the European Council as well. However, it does remain the case that the structure of the European Union is not conducive to the setting up of real parties: elections to the European Parliament have been regarded as being, to an extent, ‘second-order’ compared with national elections, and the system as a whole is also typically regarded as suffering from a ‘democratic deficit’. What is needed is to design an institutional mechanism to facilitate competitive party government in the European Union.

Of the multitude of languages, many are endangered and threatened with extinction; this is a great potential loss of witnesses to human perception. Academies should support non-majority languages and oppose the acceleration of their loss due to the rise of computers with programs limited to majority languages.

In spite of the need for harmonisation resulting from the internal market, competition between rules has increased considerably during the last years. Several factors have contributed to this development, in particular the principle of mutual recognition, the new method for harmonisation, the decreasing sensitivity with respect to differences in the costs of production and the principle of subsidiarity. The use of the directive as the privileged instrument for harmonisation is contrary to the principle of subsidiarity at the level of control of Community rules. It is therefore appropriate to substitute framework regulations to directives in order to facilitate the control of implementation by interested individuals and companies.