Människoriket Tage Lindboms modernitetskritik i efterkrigstidens Sverige

Abstract

During the period after the Second World War Sweden underwent a quick transformation due to a strong economic development. Decades-long rule for the Social Democratic Party now led to the creation, in Sweden, of a modern welfare state. This period in Swedish history is often considered to be the time when “the Swedish model” was formed. Tage Lindbom (1909–2001) was a historian and intellectual in the Swedish labor movement. For almost thirty years he was head of the labor unions archive, Arbetarrörelsens arkiv, in Stockholm. In 1951 he published a book called Efter Atlantis, where he raised critical concerns about the socialist ideology and how it could be combined with democracy. This book led to an intense debate within the Social Democratic Party, and Lindbom experienced being semi-ostracized from the labor movement. As a result, he became more marginalized. In 1962, Lindbom published the book Sancho Panzas väderkvarnar, in which he expressed harsh criticism of socialist and liberal policies, from a conservative standpoint. A basic concept of Lindbom’s was Människoriket (Man’s kingdom). He used this concept to describe the secular hubris of the premises underpinning the modern Swedish society he saw taking shape. One of Lindbom’s core beliefs was that the secular Människoriket, meaning the secular society taking form, was a society where people had lost their connection with God and the God-given order and instead proclaimed man as ruler. The same year, 1962, Lindbom secretly joined a Sufi order in Switzerland under the leadership of Frithjof Schoun. Schoun’s esoteric school of thought, philosophia perennis, was an important inspiration for Lindbom’s thinking. From the 1960s onward, Lindbom published several books where he expressed similar conservative criticism of the modern western society that he had published earlier about the Swedish society. Some of these books were translated into foreign languages. Nevertheless, his readership in Sweden was still small. This thesis explores Lindbom`s critic of the Swedish afterwar modernity and focuses on three of its aspects; the idea of material progress, democracy and man in the modern society.