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5 - Swedish Social Democracy and Weimar

Engineering the Democratic Population with the Myrdals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2024

Richard Ned Lebow
Affiliation:
King's College London
Ludvig Norman
Affiliation:
University of Stockholm
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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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Weimar's Long Shadow , pp. 119 - 144
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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