This thesis investigates how the economic crisis, later known as the great depression which harvested especially the Western world during the 1930s, was depicted by the Swedish newspapers between the great crash on the stock market on Wall Street in New York 1929 until 1931. The purpose of this thesis is to see how the depiction of the crisis looked like in the Swedish newspapers during the time being and to see if there were any differences between newspapers that were of different political standings. Also, part of the purpose is to try to locate any changes in their way of depicting the crisis during the time that is being investigated. The theoretical and methodological approach is based on critical discourse analysis as presented by Norman Fairclough and the investigation of the newspapers has mainly been based on a textual analysis of their use of language but also an analysis of their arguments and presented ideas has been done. Their arguments were often politically bounded and their way of expressing their thoughts on the matter were generally with a high degree of confidence. The conclusion is that the newspapers in Sweden were depicting the economic crisis in ways which were dependant on their different political boundaries. 

This paper aims to analyze the philosophical implications of the atomic bomb in the thinking of three German post-war philosophers: Günther Anders, Hannah Arendt, and Karl Jaspers. Although they differ greatly in interest and philosophical perspective, the atomic bomb can be discerned as a problem of humanity's technological, ethical, and political conditions in the intersection of their authorships. In the examination of their ideas, they are situated within a diachronic tradition of philosophy of technology. Their common entanglement with phenomenological-hermeneutic philosophy is also considered, most notably in the form of the influence of Martin Heidegger.

For Anders, the atomic bomb is the defining feature of the ethical and political conditions of post-war humanity, yet humans are unable to grasp its reality. In the thinking of Jaspers, the bomb necessitates a supra-political principle grounded in the faculty of reason. For him, politics in the nuclear age must rest upon the responsibility of the many individuals, in an ethical re-birth of humanity. Arendt primarily understands the bomb as a product of the increasing power of the thoughtless instrumentality of science. The destructive potential of atomic weapons solidifies to her a crisis in the meaning of politics, in which brute force has undermined political power.

All three thinkers share the view that the atomic bomb must be understood in conjunction with a certain thought- and meaninglessness in the science and politics of their contemporary. The bomb also signifies to them a technological obscuring of human agency, the implications of which are exacerbated by the fact that it has also immensely improved the ability of one individual to commit heinous acts. In impairing the conditions for ethical action and meaningful politics for lasting peace, the bomb necessitates these very same principles. By threatening to make humanity as mortal as only individuals had been before, the bomb has made radical change in human thinking and activity urgent. However, to what extent sufficient adaptations are probable, or even possible, is a question in which the philosophers discussed in this paper diverge.

In line with recent research that regards the Second World War as a "defining moment" rather than a temporary disruption to the development of consumer societies, this paper explores how consumers were imagined in nonbelligerent Sweden. The main empirical source material consists of business-to-business advertisements from newspaper and magazine publishers aimed at potential advertisers. There, publishers portrayed their readers as suitable consumers, and, given that the division of the press constituted the main infrastructure for reaching different consumer groups, this is interpreted as a key to understanding market segmentation processes. The findings show how geographical, demographic, and psychological factors were considered in optimizing advertising influence and reaching classed and gendered target audiences. Although the segmentation process consolidated during the war, focusing on stable, large consumer groups, the imagined consumer also underwent fundamental changes, combating anxiety and despair through dreams of both future and present patriotic consumption.

Since Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch in the 1920s, Hegelian Marxism has played a prominent role as a radical intellectual tradition in modern political theory. This anthology investigates how these Hegelian Marxists, in different historical, political and intellectual contexts during the last century, have employed Hegel’s philosophy with the aim of developing and renewing Marxist theory.

Besides Lukács and Korsch the volume includes articles dealing with the thoughts of Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Evald Ilyenkov, Lucio Colletti and Slavoj Žižek. The overall purpose is to investigate if, and the degree to which, these thinkers could be interpreted as Hegelian Marxists, and how they use the Hegelian philosophy to better understand their own current society as well as situate themselves in relation to orthodox forms of Marxism. Taken together, the articles can hopefully contribute to an intensification of discussions about the critical and self-criticalphilosophy of Marxism today.

This essay examines the engagement of the European Far Right during the Cold War with the legacy of classical geopolitics, above all the work of Mackinder, Spykman, Haushofer and Schmitt. The concerns of geopolitics with immanent spatial "realities" gave it an instrumental utility for the EFR as the latter sought to move beyond the obsessive preoccupation of interwar fascism (in its dominant German version) with factors of genetics and race. Beyond this, classical geopolitics provided conceptual and theoretical support for the EFR as it elaborated new ideological principles and political projects. On the one hand this involved a novel vision of pan-European unity that rested on the principle of continentalist autarky. On the other, with key concepts such as Heartland and Rimland, classical geopolitics offered a sophisticated but strategically flexible meta-geography of Eurasian space that was of immense value, for it could accommodate the EFR's ambivalence regarding the geographical limits of its envisioned pan-Europe and the nature of its relationship to its Eurasian neighbour, the USSR. The essay argues that while the conceptual continuities with the interwar period were vital, the deployment of classical geopolitical theory by the EFR after 1945 was driven by a logic of its own, one that was directly connected to the historical context and political realities of the Cold War. EFR ideologues used classical geopolitics essentially in order to negotiate the particular challenges of their day and to sustain and develop their own political agendas.

Despite the sympathy for Vladimir Putin’s Russia expressed by much of the European far right (EFR), the question of Europe and Russia has for decades represented a considerable ideological challenge for it. This essay examines the ways in which this challenge is addressed in the work of the French intellectual Guillaume Faye (1949-2019), one of the EFR’s most influential theoreticians. Faye’s writings reveal the full scope of the far right’s ambivalence toward Russia, identifying it alternatively as a mortal enemy of the pan-European project, a potential strategic ally that despite its non-European character was vital for Europe’s purposes of resisting the American behemoth, or finally as a thoroughly European country and an essential part of the European “bio-culture.” In order to support these various positions, Faye deploys alternative ideological narratives, one based on geopolitics and the other on the precepts of ethnopolitics. This particular ideological juxtaposition has a deep history in the thinking of the EFR, and Faye’s polemics reveal how it has become intertwined with the special complexities of the Russia problem.

The striking affinities that have developed between radical-conservative movements in Western Europe and Russia since the end of the Cold War have been widely noted. This essay considers these affinities through the example of the Soviet historian and geographer Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912–1992). It argues that Gumilev and the European New Right developed perspectives that were highly comparable, founded on similar principles, and articulated through similar images and allusions. Yet despite the powerful resonances in terms of basic concepts and theoretical orientation, there were nonetheless deep differences in terms of the conclusions regarding the practical implications for their respective societies that Gumilev and the Europeans deduced from these principles.

Although we often think about geographical continents as fixed natural entities, they are in fact also the product of imaginative construction.  The most recent example of this process is the emergence of the continental concept of "Eurasia."  This brief essay considers the historical origins of the Eurasia idea in the geological sciences of the 19thcentury, its development in 20th-century theories of global geo-strategy as well as ideologies of Russian national identity, and its eventual international "breakthrough" into public discourses with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.  It discusses some of the different ways Eurasia is represented today in terms of its boundaries and essential characteristics, and finally offers a series of arguments for the usefulness of "Eurasian Studies" as a platform for university research and teaching.

This essay examines the Etnogenez series of science fiction and fantasy novels. Launched in 2009 by the media producer, "political technologist," and Kremlin insider Konstantin Rykov, Etnogenez has enjoyed truly phenomenal success, developing into one of the most ambitious publishing projects of the post-Soviet period. At present it numbers more than fifty works, which circulate in millions of copies and additionally are broadly disseminated on the Internet and as e-books, audiobooks, and podcasts. There are Etnogenez fan clubs, computer games, and dozens of Internet discussion groups. Although the novels in the series differ widely in their plots and subjects, and are written in a variety of different science fiction genres, all of them are loosely inspired by the work of the historian and geographer Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev, in particular his theories of ethnogenesis (from which the project takes its name), passionarnost', and Eurasianism. The essay explores the powerful resonances between the Etnogenez project, the Gumilevian legacy, and the leading political and social narratives of Putin's Russia.

The essays collected in this forum discuss the geopolitical legacy of the Russian Revolution of 1917, one of the most momentous political events of the twentieth century. From a range of different academic disciplines and perspectives, the authors consider how the profound transformations in society and politics were refracted through space and geography, and how enduring these refractions proved to be. The authors focus on three themes that have been dominant in Russian affairs over the past century: 1)the problem of center-periphery relations, 2)the civilizational dynamics of Russia’s self-identification in relation to Europe and to Asia, and 3)the geopolitics of national identity.

The aim of this article is to nuance notions of 'pronatalism' by applying it as an analytical concept for studying population and family policy Sweden and Finland in the 1940s and 1950s. This endeavour is pursued by analysing the ideologies and practices of three pronatalist non-governmental organisations from Sweden, Finland and Swedish Finland: the Swedish Population and Family Federation (Befolkningsforbundet Svenska Familjevarnet), the Finnish Population and Family Welfare League (Vaestoliitto) and the Swedish Population Federation in Finland (Svenska Befolkningsforbundet i Finland, SBF). All three organisations promoted family-friendly policies, emphasised the need for wide-spread population policy education or 'propaganda', and framed pronatalist population policy as a collective issue of the nation or 'people', yet with different motivations and framings. Vaestoliitto and SBF related the so-called population question to an external threat: the Soviet Union that threatened the geopolitical status of Finland, and the pressure of the Finnish-speaking majority, respectively. In addition, SBF saw that the Finland-Swedes were delusional about their demographic and cultural vulnerability and were hence causing their own demise. Familjevarnet, on the other hand, first and foremost connected family and population policy to the furthering of welfare, solidarity and democracy, primarily within Sweden but also transnationally. Respectively, the organisations also framed motherhood slightly differently. Vaestoliitto and SBF portrayed procreation as a civic duty and motherhood as the most important role of women. Familjevarnet also viewed motherhood as an important and natural role for women, yet not as an exclusive civic duty. Rather, it emphasised that all citizens had a duty to contribute to a positive demographic development and family-friendly society, either through procreation or by partaking in the cost of bringing up children.

In this thesis I look at how the notion of a culture war operates within the nationalistic, Swedish identitarian movement, in some contexts also referred to as the Nordic alternative right. I argue that despite the movement’s focus on culture, provocation and internet humor, they articulate an existential threat which calls for a fascist revolution and rebirth of a nation and its people. They aim to establish a dichotomy between a degenerate society and a nationalistic community. The latter is perceived as an authentic, biologically, culturally and territorially bound entity, while the former is blamed for wanting to destroy said natural community and replace it with a liberal, homogenous globalism. Utilizing the concept of “imagined community” and understanding nationalism as a discourse – as a text that writes itself in hopes of formulating a coherent and totalizing ideology in which the subject finds sense of the world and its place in it – I show how the identitarian movement very consciously aims to create a conspiratorial story of the impending death of the white race. Thus what is at stake is a perceived matter of life and death, which in itself becomes the primary tactic of legitimizing the movement’s existence and the primary method in attempting to interpellate subjects into their movement. Through the idea of metapolitics, an understanding of politics which centres around the notion of that the world is a battleground of ideas, the identitarian movement today primarily uses the internet and what they call “alternative medias” to both discredit the world they oppose and to spread their own nationalistic ideas. It is also on internet that their conspiratorial worldview is able to have its strongest impact, as it is a forum where opinions can be left unchallenged. Through conspiracy, the movement formulates an enemy which can be located in almost all domains of life, even within the subject themselves. In this context, the metapolitical objective is to, on one hand, through ideas of masculinity, whiteness and anti-feminism, call for a perceived true type of subject that is of fundamental value to the imagined community, while on the other hand use it as a weapon in the perceived culture war. I conclude by remarking that it is in their anti-feminism that their critique is most harmful and potent, as it speaks in the same language as what I perceive to be a contemporary dominant attitude in politics.

Regulating education is a vital part of government. This thesis is inspired by recent changes on the political landscape of higher education. It is guided by an interest in how political objectives and concepts of ideal social relationships are transformed and expressed through government university policies and their consequences. An early stage of what is now commonly referred to as the modern state and the modern research university, rather than present or relatively recent developments, will be explored. Instead of studying trends on the European continent, the thesis inquiries into an attempt made by the Swedish government to revise the constitutions of Swedish schools and universities through the so-called Educational Commission appointed in 1745.

The purpose of the thesis is to apply a modern policy perspective to the Educational Commission’s attempt at reforming the constitution of the Swedish universities. The aim is to illuminate the construction of university regulations and to place this within a larger framework of policy making during the Age of Liberty (Frihetstiden) in Sweden.

The Commission was an attempt by the Swedish government to implement educational changes based on a holistic view of the realm. It was one of several contemporary initiatives with nationwide ambitions. The Commission did not, however, succeed in reaching its formal objectives, but by placing too much emphasis on what the Commission did not achieve one risks overlooking other results and consequences. It initiated new communication structures, operating procedures and accountability schemes. It changed the regulations for assessing higher education making the university transparent and accountable to the government in new ways. New administrative routines for producing university reform were introduced.

The Commission also provided university actors with a legitimate channel for voicing their opinions in relation to the government. They were given a legitimate position to formulate problems, questions and solutions regarding the university. The demands of the professors for increased autonomy in seeking knowledge and providing education stood against the claims made by the government for added control and insight into academic affairs. Through the Commission, the views of the professors were put into circulation in an official political context.

The need for university reform. The educational commission’s description of the problems in Swedish higher education 1745-1751.

During the so called age of liberty in Sweden (1721-1772), demands were promptly made for concrete applications of the rather elusive idea of 'utility'. One grand expression of these claims was the educational commission appointed in 1745 to investigate whether and in which ways the Swedish educational system, including the universities, should be reformed. Previous studies have primarily focused on analyzing the commission’s reform proposal; its content, potential consequences and the response it received from Uppsala University in particular. The relationship between the commission and the universities has, moreover, almost exclusively been considered as a struggle for influence over Sweden’s higher education. This article focuses instead on the ideas of the commission regarding the need for university reform. The article aims to suggest alternative approaches for subsequent studies, however I wish to also indicate the contours of a more nuanced understanding of the intentions of the commission. The article takes as an analytical starting point the assessment made by the commission that Swedish universities failed in reaching their legitimate goal: to educate students for positions in government offices. As this failure was considered harmful for the country it was believed to be in the state’s interest to regulate the influx of students into higher education as well as the knowledge and qualifications these students should have acquired upon graduation. Previous studies have considered the commission almost exclusively as a manifestation of the principle that universities should contribute to the economic utility or welfare of the country. This article brings to the fore that while the economy was indeed important, additional attention should be given to broader political interests of the commission.

In this MA thesis I want to examine if it is possible to be writing a historical narrative with other tools than words. Rufina Bazlova is a Belarusian textile artist, currently based in Prague, who is telling us her narrative about the falsified elections in Belarus held in August 2020. She does it using embroidery, strongly connected with traditional Belarusian symbols used in the crafts that has been an important source of belief in everyday life for women in Belarus since the early 11th century. What kind of narrative is the artist telling us? In what way can her embroidery be seen as cultural memories? I am using the methods formal analysis by Heinrich Wölfflin and iconography and iconology by Erwin Panofsky to explore the hidden meanings in five of Bazlovas embroidery pieces, Female solidarity, Parliament House, Streets of Belarus, Solidarity with Soligorsk and Run from a gun. They are all a part of the work of art named Belarusian Vyzyvanka. I am placing Bazlovas embroidery in the context of cultural memories by looking at them with the eyes of different researchers in the field of cultural memory studies. The thesis has a range from descripting the meaning of traditional textile symbols to implementing the methods of art history. I am continuing with placing the embroidery into the field of cultural memory studies and asking questions about freedom of speach and the political situation in Belarus today. I am looking back in the Belarusian history to find some of my answers and I am adding a transnational perspective to my examination.

This thesis examines the relation between the conception of an act as the original ground of all knowledge and the conception of the I as self-limiting in the philosophies of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Benjamin Höijer. By relating the philosophical project of these two thinkers to Kant’s definition of enlightenment it argues that, while both Fichte and Höijer seek to find a satisfactory refutation of scepticism, their motive for doing this is chiefly a practical rather than a theoretical one: their ambition is to show how knowledge is only possible through human freedom and independence. Thus, the scep-tical doubt about whether true knowledge of the external world is possible is transformed into a ques-tion about how the fundamentally free and infinite I can stand in a relation to a “not-I” posited beyond itself. Both Fichte and Höijer try to answer this question by arguing that such a limit of the I’s subjec-tivity must be a product of an original free act, and that it is therefore only thinkable in relation to the infinite nature of the concept of action. The main difference between their respective philosophies lies in their characterisations of this original, limit-imposing act: for Fichte, it is synonymous with the I, while for Höijer, it must necessarily precede any agent.

During the 19th century, most Swedish philosophers considered the Orient, rather than ancient Greece, the birthplace of philosophical thought. This article examines the arguments in support of this viewpoint and reconstructs the meaning of the concept “oriental philosophy” used at the time. The aims of this article are therefore twofold. Firstly, it examines and maps out the way in which the history of philosophy was treated by 19th century Swedish philosophers. This question has not been studied in depth, and the article therefore contributes to a deeper understanding of Swedish academic philosophy during this period. Secondly, since the Swedish source material contains many examples of how historians of philosophy described oriental thought, the article also contributes to an understanding of modern European orientalism and oriental studies in general. The conclusion is that, as a concept, oriental philosophy played a key role in 19th-century debates on the origins of philosophical thought; ideas about oriental culture could be, and indeed were, used both to formulate Eurocentric narratives about the history of philosophy and to challenge such narratives. This article suggests that its conclusion could likely be extended to German historiography of philosophy, and that further studies on this issue are needed.

The concept of Bildung, sometimes translated as self-cultivation, is at the core of an influential tradition of educational thought. What is the relation between Bildung and interculturality? Drawing on Wilhelm von Humboldt and Hans-Georg Gadamer, and on so-called transformative learning theory, Bildung is interpreted as a process of transforming one’s meaning perspective in encounters with others. A meaning perspective is a set of largely implicit presuppositions underlying one’s habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. Confrontation with alternative perspectives can be an opportunity to become aware of one’s own perspective, to critically assess it and to transform it. Thus conceived, Bildung is closely related to interculturality.

Hume’s ethics is concerned not only with the metaphysical status of moral qualities but equally, if not more, with the problem of determining to what extent and under what conditions issues of moral disagreement and inquiry can be decided by rational argumentation. This paper argues that Hume’s solution to the second problem is a form of perspectivism: the rational decidability of moral issues depends on the existence of shared perspectives, or sets of assumptions and correlated dispositions to feelings, and is largely independent of the metaphysical status of moral qualities. An issue of disagreement may thus be rationally decidable among people with certain dispositions to feeling but not among others. A similar perspectivist reading is suggested for Hume’s analysis of knowledge about causes and effects.

Ett återkommande tema i Hans-Georg Gadamers Sanning och metod (1960) är hans kritik av empatitanken. Att tolka en text handlar inte om att återskapa eller efterlikna en annan människas situation och perspektiv utan snarare om att föra en sorts dialog med henne om die Sache, den sakfråga som texten handlar om. ”Att förstå är primärt att komma överens”, säger Gadamer i en sorts sammanfattande slogan. Vilka är Gadamers invändningar mot empatitanken, och hur allvarliga är de? Jag skisserar problembakgrunden i den hermeneutiska och empatiteoretiska traditionen och diskuterar därefter Gadamers argument.

I essän ”En dialog” (1751) argumenterar David Hume för att det finns universella, kulturoberoende moraliska principer, och i essän ”Om polygami och skilsmässor” (1742) ger han ett entydigt universalistiskt svar på en tillämpat normativ fråga när han hävdar att polygami är förkastligt oberoende av kultur eller tradition. På vilka grunder förkastar Hume polygami? Hur kan han hävda att dessa och andra moraliska argument och ståndpunkter är universellt giltiga? Och hur kan universalismen förenas med den moraliska sentimentalismen? Jag skisserar först argumentet mot polygami i ”Om polygami och skilsmässor” och idén om ett stadigt och allmänt perspektiv i Treatise och Enquiry. Huvuddelen av diskussionen ägnas därefter åt Humes behandling av kulturrelativismens problem i ”En dialog”.