Rationalizing the Individual – Engineering Society: The Case of Sweden

Abstract

The ‘scientization of the social’ noted by Lutz Raphael can also be observed in twentieth-century Sweden.¹ Industrialization, modernization processes, and the global economic crisis created even in the North a need for experts and technologies to guide an increasingly complex society. As in Germany, the level of ideas was dominated by the utopia of a socially harmonious ‘national community’, which shaped both politics and the work of social experts. Since the purpose of social policy was always to keep the ‘national body’ ‘healthy’, it was thus at all times population policy. However, Sweden was characterized by a feature that set it apart from National Socialism, namely a tradition of self-evaluation that was more than a century old. While in Germany in the 1930s a rhetoric of the ‘deed’ (die Tat), of ‘decisionism’ as a radical rupture, was able to gain political influence, Sweden bet on permanent calibration. Although Swedish experts employed the rhetoric of radicalism in an almost inflationary manner, in actuality they rejected every form of revolutionary transformation of Swedish society. In essence, the only radical thing was their hypostatization of a rational approach to problems; from their perspective, all of the solutions they proposed were decidedly free of ideology.