This article reflects on the author’s experience of creating and teaching a set of courses with North American themes within the academic discipline of idéhistoria, intellectual history, at a Swedish university. It stresses the value of an area studies approach for training students in “a researcher’s way to see and work” within this discipline. The more courses with themes from the US (and Canada) become “American studies,” the better they contribute to prepare students to think about past thought in a way that defines the task of idéhistoria (in the author’s opinion), namely a strictly contextualist approach. The article offers some examples of this. The fact that much about the US is familiar to Swedish students creates opportunities to understand past thought historically by exploring contexts that gradually make apparently familiar things less familiar, thus allowing them to be understood in unfamiliar ways. The courses have also become exercises in linguistic and cultural translation from American English, as a language that is fairly familiar to most Swedish students becomes more complex in their perception, with meanings and bearings shifting in time and space.

This article brings forward a set of examples from the “Swedological” literature that had its golden era circa 1930–1980 – i.e. non-Swedish interpretations of Swedish society (or features of it), done in order to fight ideological wars on non-Swedish soil, using Sweden as a case in point. The theme of Sweden as a peaceful nation, both in its internal developments and in its role in the world, was a crucial feature of the genre from the outset. It has been possible to interpret Sweden’s neutrality policies (including heavy production and exports of arms) in different ways. This has also been the case with Swedish attempts to take responsibility in the world, showing global conscience (e.g. through criticism against international bullies or through foreign aid). The theme of peaceableness has, over the decades, been a tool in fights between “Swedophiles” and “Swedoclasts,” both sides applying a certain “logic of debunkery” in their mutual attempts to disclose the opposite camp’s depictions as myths.

For decades “Swedology” was a rich and polemically charged genre. “Swedophiles” and “Swedoclasts” were quite as eager to deploy images of Sweden as weapons in foreign contexts as they were inter- ested in the country as such. A telling example is the genre’s early clas- sic, Marquis W. Childs’s Sweden: The Middle Way from 1936. With the backdrop of Dwight Eisenhower’s attempt to get back at Childs by branding Sweden as an extreme society in 1960, this essay aims to see Childs’s book as an argument in its original context during the New Deal. Rather than initiating the 1930s’ American wave of Swedophilia, Childs phrased his argument as an implicit polemic against its appar- ent exaggerations. Sweden was not a Utopia; the point in studying its example was on the contrary the pragmatism shown in the Swedes’ attempts to solve everyday problems in a reasonable and genuinely democratic way, negotiating and compromising. As a text implicitly supporting the Roosevelt agenda, Childs’s book was far from encour- aging federal dirigisme, expert rule and central planning (“social engi- neering”): on the contrary the message to other New Dealers was to shun such things in favor of grass-roots activities and initiatives. The predominant theme – the consumers’ cooperation movement’s central role in counteracting monopolies, thus creating economic efficiency and turning Sweden into the world’s only truly working laissez-faire economy – harmonized with Childs’s commitment to projects like the federal rural electrification program, which in a “Swedish” manner was founded on co-ops and a vision of popular self-determination.