Introduction: libertarianism in the Nordics since the 1980s

ABSTRACT

This essay introduces the theme issue about libertarianism in the Nordics since the 1980s. It sets out the key ambition of our theme issue, namely to de-Americanize and transnationalize the study of libertarianism by approaching libertarianism as a movement and an ideology that has been introduced, translated and adapted into very different regional and national contexts across the world. In so doing, the essay argues that the historical conditions for libertarianism in the Nordics were set by the heritage of welfare statism, social democracy and social liberalism, in ways that underscored its nature as counter-ideology and protest. We argue that there is a distinct temporality across the Nordics, and we introduce the main contents of the issue contributions on, respectively, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland.

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Notes

1. See for example B. v. d. Bossen, ‘Libertarianism’, in Standard Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2019), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/libertarianism/ (accessed 5 June); David Boaz, ‘Libertarianism’, in Britannica (2004), https://www.britannica.com/topic/libertarianism-politics (accessed 5 June); M. Zwolinski, ‘Libertarianism’, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2008), https://iep.utm.edu/libertar/ (accessed 5 June).

2. See the standard account B. Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism. A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (New York: Public Affairs, 2007).

3. J. Burns, Goddess of the Market. Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

4. J. Raimondo, An Enemy of the State. The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2000); D. Bessner, ‘Murray Rothbard, political strategy, and the making of modern libertarianism’, Intellectual History Review, 24:4 (2014), pp. 441–456; J. Jensen, ‘Repurposing Mises: Murray Rothbard and the Birth of Anarchocapitalism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 83:2 (2022), pp. 315–332.

5. Q. Slobodian, ‘Anti-’68ers and the Racist-Libertarian Alliance: How a Schism among Austrian School Neoliberals Helped Spawn the Alt Right’, Cultural Politics, 15:3 (2019), pp. 372–386; Jensen, ‘Repurposing Mises’; J. Ganz, ‘The forgotten man’, The Baffler, 15 December 2017, https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-forgotten-man-ganz (accessed 5 June 2023); J. Ganz, ‘Murray Rothbard’s American: Returning to the Ur-Text of Trumpism’, Unpopular Front, 20 May 2022, https://johnganz.substack.com/p/murray-rothbards-america?s=w (accessed 5 June 2023).

6. M. Cooper, ‘The Alt-Right: Neoliberalism, Libertarianism and the Fascist Temptation’, Theory, Culture & Society, 38:6 (2021): pp. 29–50; W. Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).

7. Cooper, ‘The Alt-Right’; Slobodian, ‘Anti’68ers’; S. Freeman, ‘Illiberal libertarians: Why libertarianism is not a liberal view’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, 30/2 (2001), pp. 105–151.

8. See first of all Q. Slobodian, The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018) and P. Mirowski & D. Plehwe (Eds), The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

9. Kevin Brooks, Why neoliberalism failed in France. Political sociology of the spread of neoliberal ideas in France 1974–2014 (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2021).

10. For a recent account of neoliberalism in the Netherlands, see. M. Oudenampsen & B. Mellink, Neoliberalisme: Een Nederlandse Geschiedenis (Boom Geschiedenis: Amsterdam, 2022). See also M. Oudenampsen, ’In de Boksring van de Vrijheid: Den Uyl versus Hayek’, in M. Hurenkamp & R. Cuperus (Eds) Omstreden Vrijheid (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 2015), pp. 112–135.

11. Ongoing doctoral project, Veikko Jarmala, University of Helsinki, https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/fi/persons/veikko-j-jarmala (accesed 5 June 2023).

12. See Andersson’s paper in this issue. To our knowledge, no central archival collection exists of the ILS, but traces of these gatherings are found in various other archives such as for instance Swedish Timbro (Center för Näringslivshistoria archive center, SAF records).

13. L. Louw & F. Kendall, South Africa: the Solution (Johannesburg: Amagi Publications, 1986). C. R. Lynch, ‘Vote with your feet. Neoliberalism, the democratic nation state, and enclave libertarianism’, Political Geography, 59 (2017), pp. 82–91.

14. J. Bockman & G. Eyal, ‘Eastern Europe as a laboratory for economic knowledge: The transnational roots of neoliberalism’, American Journal of Sociology, 108/2 (2013), pp. 310–352. Jarmala, University of Helsinki. On the notion of economic libertarianism, see Andrew Gamble, ‘Economic Libertarianism’, M. Freeden, L. R. Sargent & M. Stears (Eds) The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 405–421.

15. C. Marklund, ‘The Social Laboratory, the Middle Way and the Swedish Model: three frames for the image of Sweden’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 34/3 (2009), pp. 264–285. C. Marklund & K. Petersen, ‘Return to Sender – American Images of the Nordic Welfare States and Nordic Welfare State Branding,’ European Journal of Scandinavian Studies, 43/2 (2013). pp. 245–257.

16. See G. Scott-Smith, ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the End of Ideology and the 1955 Milan Conference: Defining the Parameters of Discourse’, Journal of Contemporary History, 37: 3 (2002), pp. 437–455.

17. We have not been able to consult the American archives, so for this tentative conclusion, we rely on the clear evidence of transnational connections both from the US, and between the Nordics, as they appear from the Nordic sources.

18. L. Mjöset, ‘A Hayekian public intellectual in Iceland’, in, Q. Slobodian and D. Plehwe, Eds Market Civilizations. Neoliberals North and South, Princeton University Press, 2023), pp. 303–33.

19. F. Sejersted, The Age of Social Democracy: Norway and Sweden in the 20^th Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

20. J. Pontusson, The limits of social democracy. Investment politics in Sweden (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

21. I. Kärrylä, Democracy and the Economy in Finland and Sweden since 1960: A Nordic Perspective on Neoliberalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

22. M. Wuokko, ‘The curious compatibility of consensus, corporatism, and neoliberalism: The Finnish business community and the retasking of a corporatist welfare state’, Business History, 63:4 (2019), pp. 668–685.

23. K. Östberg, 1968 – när allting var i rörelse: Sextiotalsradikaliseringen och de sociala rörelserna (Stockholm: Prisma, 2002); M. Wiklund, I det modernas landskap. Historisk orientering och kritiska berättelser om Sverige mellan 1969 och 1990 (Stockholm: Symposion, 2006).

24. See Andersson in this issue. K. Boréus, Högervåg (Stockholm: Tiden, 1994).

25. T. E. Jørgensen & S. L. B. Jensen, 1968 – og det der fulgte (København: Gyldendal, 2008); K. Dørum, Øyvind Tønnesson & R. H. Vaags (Eds), Arven etter 1968 (Oslo: Cappelen Damm Akademisk, 2021); Östberg, 1968 – när allting var i rörelse. See also the theme issue in Scandinavian Journal of History, 33: 4 (2008).

26. N. Glover, ‘Sweden, South Africa and the business of partnership in the 1990s: Marketing internationalism in an era of globalization’, Culture Unbound, 13:1 (2021), pp. 41–65.

27. O. Wæver, ‘Nordic nostalgia: northern Europe after the Cold War’, International Affairs, 68:1 (1992), pp. 77–102.

28. Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 9.

29. J. A. Tucker, ‘Where does the Term Libertarian Come from Anyway?’, FEE Stories 15 September 2016 – https://fee.org/articles/where-does-the-term-libertarian-come-from-anyway/ (accessed 5 June 2023).

30. See, for example, J. L. Madsen (Ed.), Den moderne liberalisme. Rødder og perspektiver (København: Breidablik, 1997) and P. K. Klitgaard, ’Classical Liberalism and modern political economy in Denmark’, Econ Journal Watch, 12:3 (2015), pp. 400–431.

31. See also the discussion of these differences in M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 276–315, though Freeden here seems to discuss the differences between social liberalism and neoliberalism rather than between libertarianism and classical liberalism.

32. See first of all Slobodian, Globalists and Mirowski & Plehwe, The Road from Mont P´lerin.

33. Burns, Goddess of the Market, pp. 104–106, 116–119, 132, and, for example, Rothbard’s critique of Friedman’s environmentalist policies in the early 1970s, M. Rothbard, Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature – and Other Essays (Washington, D.C.: Libertarian Review Press 1974), pp. 115.

34. L. P. Liggio, ‘Mont Pelerin: 1947–1978, The Road to Libertarianism,’ Libertarianism.org (December 1 1979) – https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/mont-pelerin-1947–1978-road-libertarianism (accessed 5 June 2023).

35. Jensen, ‘Repurposing Mises’, pp. 317.

36. Sejersted, The Age of Social Democracy, pp. 291–316.

37. N. Olsen, ‘A Second-Hand Dealer in Ideas: Christian Gandil and Scandinavian Configurations of European Neoliberalism, 1945–1970’, in H. Schulz-Forberg & N. Olsen (Eds) Re-Inventing Western Civilisation: Transnational Reconstructions of Liberalism in Europe in the 20^th Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), pp. 137–167.

38. A. Offner & G. Söderberg, The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy and the Market Turn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

39. J. Andersson, ‘Neoliberalism Against Social Democracy’, The Tocqueville Review, 41:2 (2020), pp. 87–107; S. L. Mudge, Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

40. Olsen, ‘A Second Hand Dealer in Ideas’.

41. L. P. Nordbakken, Krisen i norsk okonomi: Ett resultat av feilslått okonomisk politik eller frie marknedskrefter? (Oslo Fremskrittspartiets utredningsinstitut, 1991).

42. Jarmala, ongoing.

43. For a perspective on the function of Estonia as political argument and model in Finland, see the contribution on the Finnish case in this theme issue.

44. For research on Nordic populism, see for example J. Rydgren, ‘Explaining the emergence of radical right-wing populist parties: The case of Denmark’, West European Politics, 27:3 (2013), pp. 474–502; J. Rydgren, ‘Radical right populism in Sweden: Still a failure, but for how long?’, Scandinavian Political Studies, 25:1 (2002): pp. 27–56. For research on Nordic neoliberalism, see for example N. Olsen, The Sovereign Consumer: A New Intellectual History of Neoliberalism ;(Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 185–240 and O. Insett, Markedsvendingen – nyliberalismens historie i Norge (Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary fund [M19-0231-1].