Book contents
- Weimar’s Long Shadow
- Weimar’s Long Shadow
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Note on Bauhaus Font and the Cover Design
- 1 Why Weimar?
- 2 An Unheroic but Understandable Failure
- 3 Bonn’s Weimar
- 4 The Paradigmatic Example of Weimar and Postwar Political Science
- 5 Swedish Social Democracy and Weimar
- 6 Our Past, Weimar’s Present
- 7 Weimar on the Potomac?
- 8 Shadows of Babylon and Shreds of Artificial Silk
- 9 Militant Democracy
- 10 Weimar and Modernity
- Index
5 - Swedish Social Democracy and Weimar
Engineering the Democratic Population with the Myrdals
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 September 2024
- Weimar’s Long Shadow
- Weimar’s Long Shadow
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Note on Bauhaus Font and the Cover Design
- 1 Why Weimar?
- 2 An Unheroic but Understandable Failure
- 3 Bonn’s Weimar
- 4 The Paradigmatic Example of Weimar and Postwar Political Science
- 5 Swedish Social Democracy and Weimar
- 6 Our Past, Weimar’s Present
- 7 Weimar on the Potomac?
- 8 Shadows of Babylon and Shreds of Artificial Silk
- 9 Militant Democracy
- 10 Weimar and Modernity
- Index
Summary
Norman analyzes Swedish social democratic thinking in the 1930s and the form that Weimar lessons took there. Focusing on the writings of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, both enormously influential intellectual figures for social democracy during this period, it traces how the re-evaluation of democratic politics informed by Weimar’s collapse that occurred elsewhere shaped Swedish social democracy. From the analysis of social democratic thought in Sweden emerges a more general point regarding analogical reasoning and lesson-drawing in politics. The Swedish self-image as an avant-garde in rational social reform provided a degree of blindness that reduced the scope for critical self-reflection. Its unique position in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s allowed social democracy to play out unbounded in its self-perceived rationality in what could be achieved through state intervention, allowing for both highly progressive reforms and more troubling and intrusive aspects of social programs.
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- Information
- Weimar's Long Shadow , pp. 119 - 144Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024