Early in the last century the successes of science led a group of French thinkers to apply the principles of science to the study of society. These thinkers purported to have discovered the supposed 'laws' of society and concluded that an elite of social scientists should assume direct control of social life. The Counter-Revolution of Science is Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek's forceful attack on this abuse of reason.

This joint venture between ICOMOS, the advisory body to UNESCO on cultural sites, and the International Astronomical Union is the second volume in an ongoing exploration of themes and issues relating to astronomical heritage in particular and to science and technology heritage in general. It examines a number of key questions relating to astronomical heritage sites and their potential recognition as World Heritage, attempting to identify what might constitute "outstanding universal value" in relation to astronomy. "Heritage Sites of Astronomy and Archaeoastronomy--Volume 2" represents the culmination of several years' work to address some of the most challenging issues raised in the first ICOMOS-IAU Thematic Study, published in 2010. These include the recognition and preservation of the value of dark skies at both cultural and natural sites and landscapes; balancing archaeoastronomical considerations in the context of broader archaeological and cultural values; the potential for serial nominations; and management issues such as preserving the integrity of astronomical sightlines through the landscape.Its case studies are developed in greater depth than those in volume 1, and generally structured as segments of draft nomination dossiers. They include seven-stone antas (prehistoric dolmens) in Portugal and Spain, the thirteen towers of Chankillo in Peru, the astronomical timing of irrigation in Oman, Pic du Midi de Bigorre Observatory in France, Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, and Aoraki-Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve in New Zealand. A case study on Stonehenge, already a World Heritage Site, focuses on preserving the integrity of the solstitial sightlines.As for the first ICOMOS-IAU Thematic Study, a international team of authors including historians, astronomers and heritage professionals is led by Professor Clive Ruggles for the IAU and Professor Michel Cotte for ICOMOS.

History is one of the most important cultural tools to make sense of one’s situation, to establish identity, define otherness, and explain change. This is the first systematic scholarly study that analyses the complex relationship between history and religion, taking into account religious groups both as producers of historical narratives as well as distinct topics of historiography. Coming from different disciplines, the authors of this volume ask under which conditions and with what consequences religions are historicised. How do religious groups employ historical narratives in the construction of their identities? What are the biases and elisions of current analytical and descriptive frames in the History of Religion? The volume aims at initiating a comparative historiography of religion and combines disciplinary competences of Religious Studies and the History of Religion, Confessional Theologies, History, History of Science, and Literary Studies. By applying literary comparison and historical contextualization to those texts that have been used as central documents for histories of individual religions, their historiographic themes, tools and strategies are analysed. The comparative approach addresses circum-Mediterranean and European as well as Asian religious traditions from the first millennium BCE to the present and deals with topics such as the origins of religious historiography, the practices of writing and the transformation of narratives.

This book offers perhaps the most comprehensive history of pantomime ever written. No other book so thoroughly examines the varieties of pantomimic performance from the early Roman Empire, when the term “pantomime” came into use, until the present. After thoroughly examining the complexities and startlingly imaginative performance strategies of Roman pantomime, the author identifies the peculiar political circumstances that revived and shaped pantomime in France and Austria in the eighteenth century, leading to the Pierrot obsession in the nineteenth century. Modernist aesthetics awakened a huge, highly diverse fascination with pantomime. The book explores an extraordinary variety of modernist and postmodern approaches to pantomime in Germany, Austria, France, numerous countries of Eastern Europe, Russia, Scandinavia, Spain, Belgium, The Netherlands, Chile, England, and The United States. Making use of many performance and historical documents never before included in pantomime histories, the book also discusses pantomime’s messy relation to dance, its peculiar uses of music, its “modernization” through silent film aesthetics, and the extent to which writers, performers, or directors are “authors” of pantomimes. Just as importantly, the book explains why, more than any other performance medium, pantomime allows the spectator to see the body as the agent of narrative action.

"It was the best oftimes. It was the worst oftimes. " The famous open ing sentence ofCharles Dickens' Tale oJ Two Cities can serve as a motto to characterize the mixture of optimism and pessimism with which a large number of nineteenth-century intellectuals viewed the con dition of their age. It is nowadays hardly necessary to accentuate the optimistic elements in the nineteenth-century view of history; many recent historians have sharply contrasted the complacency and the great expectations of the past century with the fears and anxieties rampant in our own age. It is often too readily assumed that a hundred years ago all leading thinkers as weil as the educated public were addicted to the cult of progress and ignored or minimized those trends of their times that paved the way for the catastrophes of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century the intoxicating triumphs of modern science undeniably induced the general public to believe that pro gress was not an accident but a necessity and that evil and immo rality would gradually disappear. Yet fears, misgivings, and anxieties were not as exceptional in the nineteenth century as is often imagined. Such feelings were not restricted to a few dissenting philosophers and poets like Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, 'Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche.