ERC President’s speech 'Human Values in the Future of Excellent Research'

-- Check against delivery --

2 December 2025

Check against delivery

Dear Minister Egelund,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

When we think about the impact of science we tend to think of discoveries in the natural sciences and the technologies that have arisen from those discoveries. Yet much of what defines the modern world was not discovered in laboratories at all.

The ideas of Marx, Weber, Schumpeter, Freud and Keynes have shaped our economies, institutions, and even our private lives as profoundly as any observation of Darwin, equation of Einstein or experiment of Bohr. Nobody ever started a revolutionon account of the theory of relativity and nobody ever turned to quantum physics to get out of an economic depression.

Marx's analysis of capital still frames political debate across continents. Weber's study of bureaucracy explains how organisations function. Schumpeter's idea of creative destruction still describes the rhythm of innovation. Keynes taught governments how to act in a crisis. Freud changed how we understand the self and motivation.
Science and technology transform the material worldwhile the social sciences and humanities transform the way we live within it. Both change the conditions of human life, though in different ways.

Consider what we might call social technologies - inventions made of institutions, rules, and shared understandings rather than machines. The rule of law, trial by jury, and independent courts are social technologies: they make cooperation possible by replacing personal authority with predictable rules. So are money, credit, and insurance, which turn trust and risk into calculable forms. The joint-stock company, the pension system, and the constitution are all designed systems that allow large societies to function.

A social technology is a human solution to a coordination problem. It is as much a product of creativity and experiment as an engine or a vaccine. Double-entry bookkeeping made modern capitalism possible, statistics made welfare policy feasible, peer review and universities are technologies for producing reliable knowledge. Even the idea of 'scientific method' is itself a social technology, a set of agreed procedures for deciding what counts as evidence.
Modern digital platforms, carbon-trading schemes, and intellectual-property regimes continue this lineage. Each uses rules, data, and incentives to shape collective behaviour. They are the operating systems of modern life. And none of them could have been designed without the insights of economics, law, or sociology.

The same applies to broader ideas such ascitizenship, rights, democracy, equality. These are inventions of moral and political imagination. The Enlightenment thinkers who developed them were experimenting with institutions just as engineers experiment with materials. Mary Wollstonecraft's call for women's education, or John Stuart Mill's argument for liberty, were acts of design as well as philosophy. They built the conceptual frameworks within which modern democracies operate.

These examples remind us that discovery is not confined to the physical world. It also happens in how we order our societies. The invention of representative government or of welfare insurance required as much ingenuity as the discovery of penicillin.

The work of researchers like Jean Tirole (an ERC grantee and Nobel prize winner), whose studies of regulation and incentives reshaped how governments think about markets, is a reminder that the social sciences continue to invent tools that structure society.

Richard Feynman once said that scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad - but it does not carry instructions on how to use it. Those instructions, he added, must come from elsewhere. This is where the social sciences and humanities come in. They study the values, beliefs, and institutions that determine how power is used. They help societies to choose what 'good' and 'bad' mean in practice.

Take artificial intelligence. The technical challenge of building a model is smaller than the human challenge of deciding how it should be used: what kind of data reflect fairness, who is accountable, how do we preserve privacy and dignity? These are questions of law, ethics, and culture.

Climate change offers another example. We understand the physics of the atmosphere, yet emissions keep rising. The barriers are social, how people behave, how trust is built, how political systems handle long-term risk. The answers lie in sociology, psychology, history, and political science.

Neglecting those dimensions has consequences. The Industrial Revolution mastered energy but ignored ecology. The early internet connected people without anticipating alienation, polarisation or disinformation. Medical innovation has extended life while creating new dilemmas about autonomy and equity. Scientific power without social understanding leads to problems that no technology can fix.

This is why the social sciences and humanities are not decorative but foundational. They show how societies function and how they change.

It is therefore misleading to divide knowledge into the 'useful' and the 'ornamental.' A vaccine depends on trust as much as on biochemistry andrenewable energy depends on behaviour as much as on engineering. Every important challenge sits at the point where facts meet values.

The ERC has always understood this. Some of its most original projects come from the social sciences and humanities, studies of democratic institutions, migration, inequality, and the evolution of moral norms. These are not marginal to innovation, they are part of its foundation.

To understand human values, we need disciplines that study humans in all their variety, their institutions, beliefs, and contradictions. The humanities and social sciences do not promise comfort, they aim for understanding. And understanding is what allows knowledge, of every kind, to serve society.

The Freedom to Question

There is a growing tendency to treat the social sciences and humanities as useful only when they help achieve predefined goals, to improve communication, shape behaviour, or increase acceptance of innovation. None of that is wrong in itself, but it narrows what research is for. If we only value scholarship when it serves an agenda, we lose the freedom to ask the questions that might matter most.

You see this in the language of many funding calls. Social scientists and humanists are invited into large consortia on climate, health, or security, but often at the end of the process, expected to add 'ethical' or 'societal' reflections once the technical design is done. They become translators rather than co-authors of the research questions.

That is not integration. It is participation without influence. It treats social insight as a supplement, not as a source of discovery. Yet many of the most powerful ideas in the past century came from people who refused to accept the agenda they were given.

When Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex, she was not contributing to a gender mainstreaming exercise. She was questioning why half of humanity was treated as secondary. When Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, she was not helping a consortium to improve pesticide communication. She was revealing a blind spot in how modern societies measure progress. Hannah Arendt's work on totalitarianism was not a policy paper, it was a warning about how obedience and bureaucracy can erode moral judgment.

Each of them asked questions that others preferred not to hear. That is the value of intellectual freedom,it allows us to see what our institutions cannot see from within.

Curiosity-driven research is often described as a luxury, something that can wait until urgent problems are solved. In truth, it is how we find out what the real problems are. Without that space, we solve the wrong problems with great efficiency.

The ERC was created to defend this freedom, to give the best minds room to think independently, across all fields. The principle applies equally to a physicist exploring the structure of matter and to an anthropologist studying migration or an economist rethinking inequality. Each advances knowledge without knowing in advance what it will be used for.

Sometimes that freedom produces uncomfortable results. Economists who warned of financial instability before 2008 were ignored because their message clashed with optimism. Sociologists who studied disinformation and social media manipulation were dismissed as alarmist until we found evidence of foreign interference in election campaigns. Research that questions prevailing assumptions is rarely convenient, but it is what keeps societies adaptable.

The temptation to make knowledge serve immediate policy goals is understandable. Governments want measurable returns. But history shows that transformative ideas often emerge far from where they were expected. Darwin's study of barnacles, carried out in isolation for years, laid the groundwork for On the Origin of Species. Linguists analysing obscure dialects later contributed to machine translation. The same pattern holds in the humanities. The historian who reconstructs medieval legal systems can inform constitutional design centuries later, the philosopher examining perception can inspire advances in robotics and cognitive science.

We cannot plan discovery. It depends on the freedom to pursue ideas whose relevance is not yet visible.
When we talk about integrating SSH into large research programmes, we should therefore mean something more than adding a social component. Integration should start at the beginning in defining what counts as a challenge, what kind of change we want, and how we measure success. Otherwise, SSH becomes a decoration for decisions already made

True interdisciplinarity requires equality between disciplines. The social sciences and humanities should not be confined to explaining technology's side effects, nor turned into a moral commentary on science. They should be full partners in discovery, because understanding society is as complex as understanding nature.

When SSH is reduced to communication or ethics, young researchers learn that their role is to justify, not to question. The result is compliance rather than curiosity. Knowledge then becomes management, not exploration.

We have seen the consequences of such narrowing before. In the mid-twentieth century, scientific progress in physics and chemistry led to nuclear weapons before societies had the moral frameworks to govern them. The response, from jurists, philosophers, game theorists and political thinkers, was to rebuild those frameworks through human rights, international law, and institutions of accountability. Those were intellectual achievements as significant as the technical ones.

Today we face new frontiers, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, climate engineering , that pose similar questions of control and responsibility. The answers will not come from algorithms alone. They will depend on understanding ethics, law, psychology, and culture, the full breadth of human knowledge.

Academic Freedom is therefore not an indulgence, it is preparation. It gives societies the ability to reflect, to learn, and to correct themselves. That kind of reflection cannot be ordered by policy or forecast by metrics. It depends on trust, trust that curiosity, pursued honestly, produces insight that ultimately serves the public good.

Looking Ahead: Knowledge, Values, and the Allocation of Attention

When I look across Europe today, I see a remarkable commitment to research, both in public budgets and in the work of individual scientists and scholars. But I also see growing pressure to justify that research in advance: to promise outcomes, to align with priorities, to demonstrate relevance before a single result exists. It's understandable. Governments face urgent demands and want research to contribute to solutions. Yet, if we plan too tightly, we risk losing the openness that makes research productive in the first place.

The ERC was created to defend that openness, to give researchers time and freedom to explore the unknown. It is built on a simple principle, excellence can emerge anywhere, but only when people are trusted to pursue their own ideas. That principle is as important for the social sciences and humanities as it is for physics or biology.

In Europe today, more than half of public R&D budgets are classified as supporting the 'general advancement of knowledge,' yet how that money is divided across fields or purposes remains largely opaque. Decisions about what counts as priority knowledge are made through a mix of historical habit, institutional inertia, and political negotiation. It is rarely the result of open debate.

Across OECD countries, around 4 - 10% of total public R&D spending (GBARD) supports the social sciences and At the ERC, by contrast, allocations follow demand. Since 2007, more than 3,600 grants - around 23% of all ERC projects - have gone to SSH researchers, accounting for about €6 billion or 22% of total funding, with comparable success rates across domains. That system doesn't decide in advance how much each field deserves. It lets ideas compete on their own strength.

This raises difficult questions that often remain unspoken. How do we decide the right balance between basic and applied research? Between curiosity and mission? Between defence and health? Between physical, life, and social sciences? These choices are not just technical, they are political and ethical. They determine the shape of knowledge for decades.

The question is not whether we need technology, of course we do, but whether our distribution of effort reflects the full range of human challenges. Many of the problems Europe faces today are not technical at their core. They concern trust, cohesion, governance, and meaning. They are about how societies make choices under uncertainty. For that, we need the insight and imagination of the social sciences and humanities.

When we decide what kinds of knowledge to support, we express our collective sense of what matters. And if those decisions are made without reflection, they can quietly narrow our horizons.

These tensions are not just bureaucratic, they go to the heart of what this conference calls human values. Because in the end, the way we distribute resources is the clearest expression of our values. If we underfund the disciplines that help us understand democracy, culture, or inequality, we signal that these questions matter less than others. And if we fund research only when it fits predefined missions, we signal that curiosity is a luxury, not a public good.

I do not think that is the Europe we want. Europe's strength has always been its capacity to combine scientific creativity with reflection, to ask not only what works, but what is right. The Enlightenment that gave us modern science also gave us political philosophy, law, and art. We should remember that those traditions grow best together.

In conclusion, as we plan the next stage of European research, let us keep a broad view of what counts as knowledge. Let us continue to protect spaces where ideas can emerge unpredictably. And let us be honest about the trade-offs we make when we choose between domains, between types of research, between the measurable and the meaningful.

Scientific freedom is not an abstract principle. It is the condition under which knowledge remains credible. When researchers can follow evidence without instruction, societies gain insight they can trust. That trust is fragile, and it depends on independence.

The ERC exists to preserve that independence, for every field, from astrophysics to anthropology. Its success shows that when we invest in curiosity, we invest in Europe's long-term capacity to think, to adapt, and to act with understanding.