The Freedom Front and the welfare state counter revolution

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the Swedish Freedom Front, created in 1989 by libertarians from the editorial committee of the Nyliberalen magazine. It argues that in its emphasis on cultural, sexual, religious and political freedoms, libertarianism contained a different ideological repertoire from neoliberalism. It compares the construction of a canon of translated neoconservative and neoliberal texts with a popular and vernacular register in youth culture, consumption, and media technologies. Finally, it argues that the ascendance of neoliberalism in the early 1990s fractured libertarian arguments.

Introduction

This essay examines the history of libertarianism in relation to other dominantisms, neoliberalism and neoconservatism, in Sweden, in the period that began with Ayn Rand’s death in 1982 and ended with the arrival in government of the conservative-liberal Bildt-government (1991–1994). The Bildt government (led by conservative prime minister Carl Bildt) represented a turn in Swedish politics to neoliberalism, not least in its emphasis on opening new markets for Swedish banks in the Baltics. I argue here that the neoliberal focus on the creation of markets and on privatization broke with an earlier and much wider repertoire of libertarian arguments and came to shape the future routes of libertarianism. The paper is explicitly concerned with a popular, vernacular libertarian style, and with the relationship between the careful construction of a libertarian canon of ideas – consisting mainly of translated texts – and a countercultural, youth-dominated approach that emphasized political performance and popular culture.¹ Libertarianism has certainly been considered as a counterculture before, but I propose that there is an originality to Swedish libertarianism in the way that it turned the theme of being young in a specific welfare state setting into a powerful form of political critique. The idea of a counter-revolution to the welfare state was at the very heart of libertarian arguments as they developed from the late 1970s on – this revolutionary ideal was different in kind from later arguments of neoliberals in power. The emphasis on a materially and performatively constructed libertarian ideology is a useful point of departure from which to consider differences between libertarianism and related ideological expressions such as both neoliberalism and neoconservatism. Libertarians were, on the one hand, part of the same circles as neoliberals, and neoconservatives and libertarians also joined the power houses of the Swedish new Right – not least the thinktank Timbro, created in 1978. On the other hand, libertarians clearly viewed the sites of power with scepticism, they rejected historical liberal and conservative traditions, and they shunned the prospect of politics. Libertarians developed their own arenas and meeting spaces, and their symbolic language expressed a radical idea of freedom and a critique of political order that was markedly different from the neoliberal arguments that were at the same time beginning to make themselves heard. Where neoliberals proposed a mix of new spirited individualism, legalism and market culture, libertarians demanded an end to compulsory schooling, the free distribution of alcohol and a form of transcendence through pornography, drug culture and music.

A central venue for libertarian arguments was the magazine Nyliberalen, which began appearing in 1983. Most of my arguments pertain to Nyliberalen and to the activities of the small group in its editorial committee. Nyliberalen was first published as a stencilled newsletter. The newsletter form is important to my argument – it required little resources; in fact it could be produced on a simple copy machine; it allowed to quickly translate and publish previously unaccessible texts; its politico-philosophical content provided a certain air of intellectual gravitas but its underground circulation added a subversive tone. A central function of the newsletter was that it helped organize a network of like-minded young people, many of whom were university students in philosophy or political science. Through the newsletter could also be circulated popular cultural references, for instance to film but also to commercial products like brand name clothes or forbidden pleasures. The newsletter and later magazine also operated as a metaphor for an idealized market – in the pages of Nyliberalen one could find an exchange for black market goods including non-declared jobs, drugs, and the distribution of symbolic artefacts, such as dollar sign buttons.

This libertarian repertoire, expressed in text and materiality, was markedly different from the historic languages on the Right, even when it played on certain ideas of a continuity within liberalism. The 1980s moment was one in which, in Swedish political life, libertarianism, neoconservatism and neoliberalism were unidentified strands in a new kind of radical right wing argument that targeted ‘collectivist’ welfare state culture – both in its social democrat and in its social liberal form. The liberal conservative parties were themselves a legitimate object of contestation in this critique, which also tended to see the fundamental political dividing line not between the parliamentary Left and Right but between collectivism and individualism in the Swedish psyche. A certain counter ideological oppositional stance could be shared between these three strands in the 1980s, although libertarians were often treated with dismay as young radicals and pranksters. That changed in the mid 1980s, as the conservative party embraced neoliberalism. As conservatives foresaw a coming market revolution, they drew inspiration from the idea of a youth revolt and popularized market vernacular that libertarians pioneered. At the same time, the introduction of a governmental neoliberal program kept overtones of a conservative legacy around law and order, tradition, and family values that to libertarians was hard to accept. As the Bildt government finally came to power in 1991, it did so with an agenda that privileged privatization, through subcontracting of welfare services. Libertarians had something else in view – a radical cultural revolution and do away with welfare statism altogether. The years 1991–94 can therefore in many ways be seen as an end point to the particular counterculturalist, metapolitical, and even antipolitical project that I describe here. While some libertarians were absorbed into neoliberalism’s governmental project, others had to rethink their oppositional stance. Some of them mellowed and accepted the rules of politics, others retreated into purist ideological positions, and yet others radicalized. These fractures are key to understanding the early history of the ‘alt-Right’.

In the following, I examine the nature of libertarianism as a particular ideology borrowing heavily from the methods and languages of the 1970s and 80s youth movements, and I discuss the boundaries between a text-based attempt to create a canon, and ideological articulations through consumer culture and materiality. I argue that the novelty of libertarianism in the Nordic public space was to turn arguments of popular culture into ideology, a strategy that transformed the many artefacts and tokens of 1970s and 80s youth culture into ideological signifiers with sometimes deeply revolutionary potential. This vernacular aspect, which in many ways hid a much more elitist class politics, has been overlooked. In the Nordic context, it was arguably crucial to the construction of a political subjectivity of opposition, and to establishing a new field of social temporalities in which the revolution was both in the past before, and in the future beyond, the welfare state. A final argument in the essay is that libertarians did much to popularize the idea of a market revolution in Swedish politics, and as such, while libertarians saw themselves in an awkward tug of power with stateist neoliberals, they could when convenient also be exploited and utilized in the name of popularizing a market culture that in many ways was alien to Swedish life.

Libertarianism and the right wing turn

As a form of radical liberal protest, libertarianism suffered from the boundaries posed by its own radicality. It hardly became more than a marginal movement even if some prominent libertarians gained influence and continued to play a role on the Swedish Right. The 1980s redrew the contours of the Right in Sweden as well as in other places. Sweden’s post-war political history was shaped by social democrat dominance, and at several points in time, the Swedish Right had mobilized electorally but not managed to overturn the social democrat hold on power. Also on the right, social liberalism dominated 20^th century politics. ² The experience of a first 1976–79 liberal three party-government led to ideological radicalization – it was interpreted in key circles of business and party elites as proof of a failure of Swedish liberalism to break out of the social liberal tradition. The success of the popular conservatism of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan led these circles to openly express their disenchantment with the failure of parliamentary actors and led them to create a kind of right wing opposition around a more radical market stance. This was the impetus behind the creation of the thinktank Timbro and its publishing house Ratio, both funded by the Swedish Employer Organisation (SAF) and multinational companies.³ At the same time, there was a marked turn towards neoconservative and neoliberal ideas in conservative youth organizations. In the late 1970s, the youth association of the conservative Right mobilized under the name Fria Moderata Studentförbundet (FMSF), ‘Free conservative students’. FMSF had been created in 1942, during the first era of business and conservative mobilization against social democracy, and had historically carried a kind of urban market radicalism, at times far from the positions of the conservative party. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, FMSF introduced neoconservative and neoliberal ideas to Swedenin particular, through its Uppsala section, heavily dominated by political science, international relation law, and economics students.⁴ In 1981, the Uppsala section relabelled itself Ratio and began publishing a small review with the same name.⁵ The tone was juvenile, mixing would-be philosophical theorizing on natural rights with sex talk, diatribes against social democrat support of independence movements in Mozambique and Nicaragua, debates on the apartheid regime, and attacks on the general school curriculum. From this Uppsala environment came a generation that in the next decade would staff Timbro and Ratio, the party headquarters of the subsequent Bildt-government (1991–1994) and the opinion page of the conservative daily Svenska Dagbladet.⁶ Many of them were convinced Rand followers and Hayekians. Others came from a more diverse background, in which the student experience amplified a sense of not belonging and a search for a new sense of self.

In the Swedish speaking academic literature, these developments have mostly been dealt with as part of an overwhelming neoliberal revolution, a great rolling tide from a unified new Right.⁷ If we take our cues from the international literature, however, it is clear that there were important divisions between libertarianism, neoconservatism and neoliberalism, and these divisions are relevant for the Swedish context as well. ⁸ Timbro was directly modelled on the Heritage Foundation, the heavily funded neoconservative think tank in Washington that had an antagonistic relationship to the Libertarian Society organized after Rand’s death, and subsequently to the Cato Institute (Cato subsequently recruited one of the more prominent Swedish libertarians, Johan Norberg).⁹ In Sweden, Timbro stood for the top down of the neoliberal revolution, symbolized by corporate money and influenced by long-standing structures in Swedish political and economic elites. Libertarians did not predominantly come from these circles, but from a kind of varied social milieu that by some is described as ‘punk’ and by others as emanating from a sci-fi context that flourished in Stockholm in the late 1970s and early 1980.

A few notes on the role played by libertarian arguments in the 1980s debates that exist have been written by actors who were themselves active in libertarian networks and who have underscored their status as an underdog, marginalized current.¹⁰ This has had the effect of playing up fantasies of a kind of puritan revolutionary liberalism – and downplaying the ideological, personal and perhaps social processes which made libertarians join the circles of power even when it meant abandoning a counterculturalist or antipolitical position. The relationship to political power as such was one of the defining fault lines of the movement and a source of much inner agony and debate, as was the question of finding a Swedish footing in sometimes distinctly American debates on rationalism and objectivism. While the specificities of libertarian philosophy were concentrated on a few individuals on Nyliberalen’s editorial committee (John-Henri Holmberg, Henrik Bejke, Ingmar Nordin), a wider discussion concerned the idea of natural rights, and the relationships between individual rights and the notions of freedom and market. Libertarians gave voice to a radical notion of freedom, within which only very minimal forms of state action could be accepted. Within a Nordic liberal tradition, the idea of the market was historically embedded in accounts that emphasized it as a morally and socially situated form. In a sense, the Swedish version of neoliberalism continued this tradition – it has mainly emphasized a displacement of social responsibility from the state to the market. While neoliberals have tended to compromise with the welfare state, libertarians have remained a radical voice for decentralized solutions and also criticized market structures when they lead to concentration. These were precisely the conflict lines that began to take shape in the period of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Libertarians saw the welfare state as a theoretical and ideological anomaly incompatible with the idea of freedom, and also alien to a Nordic political tradition that they understood as built on natural rights and squeezed out by collectivism. The market, to them, was the instrument and perhaps even the guarantee to a pluralist order, but it was not the overarching ideological signifier. In fact, liberty could theoretically hold a plural set of social forms from individual resilience to cooperation and local exchange. This sat uneasily with some of the ideological activities at Timbro – the main project of which was after 1978 to create ‘the market economy’. The first issue of Nyliberalen made no mention of the market but argued for ‘absolute individual rights that can only be protected in a market economic system’.¹¹ The central idea, to libertarians, was in the potentially revolutionary notion of the free individual, a person unbound from moralistic commitments and social regulation. This person was portrayed in Nyliberalen as a person who, in the tradition of Rand, understood the positive power of egoism and the liberating force of self-interest. Such an idea of the radically unbound and purely rationalist ego was totally alien to the Swedish liberal tradition.

Another line of demarcation must be seen in the relationship between economic and cultural arguments, and the sometimes almost hedonistic notions that libertarians could embrace. Economic arguments were only a part of the libertarian repertoire, in fact before 1991, they were not prominent in Nyliberalen. ¹² Instead, libertarianism contained a profound rejection of social conservatism, but also of social democracy’s interventionist stance and a set of welfare regulations on alcohol consumption, parenting, and sexuality. Rejecting all forms of political correctness was a key element in the shock effect in some of the libertarian repertoire, which aimed explicitly to shake diverse taboos. These cultural issues underscore the ideological differences between the neoliberal and the libertarian repertoires: over time neoliberals would compromise with things that to libertarians were of principled importance – nativism but also conservative gender roles.¹³

The experience of welfare statism as oppressive and as a form of totalitarian structure, which was the effect produced by the systematic translation of Ayn Rand and the application of Rand thinking to Swedish every day life, led to the dismissal of Swedish politics as per se oppressive. As the editorial committee of Nyliberalen created the political platform the ‘Freedom Front’ – Frihetsfronten, in 1989, they envisioned it as a radical antipolitical force. Its aim was not to produce a governmental alternative but to explode the dividing lines of left and right. While the Freedom Front was a short-lived experience, the enduring significance of libertarianism in the Nordic context was surely this – it shook established politics to the core. In the Swedish context, libertarianism was a breach of heads for the larger neoliberal wave, and it allowed us to do something that the Swedish Right could not do before 1983: describe the welfare state as a totalizing project and as a cultural mentality that could only be undone with a certain kind of revolution.

Importing a canon

The ideological strategy of Swedish libertarians, for whom Nyliberalen was not the only but surely the most central outlet, had two legs: one was the careful construction of historical canon through the translation of key texts, and the other was a central emphasis on the vernacular.¹⁴ In their construction of the canon, Swedish libertarians made use of history in a way that is both similar and different from the US example, for instance. The idea of ideological purity is a central element in libertarian ideology – American libertarians, for instance, trace their origins back through revolutionary currents from the Dutch Republic, the Glorious Revolution, and the American federalist debates.¹⁵ Historical authenticity played into the libertarian utopia. The utopian element in libertarianism, in turn, helped provide the conditions of possibility that made Nordic culture receptive to arguments rooted in American populism and Austrian economics. In contrast to the US, however, there was no revolutionary liberal tradition in the Nordics that could fill a claim to authenticity. The history of revolutionary liberalism in Sweden is limited to episodes in the 1790s, the early 1800s, and the 1860s. ¹⁶ The revolutionaries that deposed Gustav III in 1792 saw themselves as the heirs of the ‘freedom years’ that began with the end of Carolinian tyranny in 1719. This is not usually the heritage claimed by Swedish neoliberals, who have rather seen a libertarian icon in the mid 19th century Minister of Finance Gripenstedt.¹⁷ That interpretation is a bit of a stretch, even if Gripenstedt is said to have been a reader of Frédéric Bastiat. In contrast, there is a Nordic context of natural rights arguments (in both Sweden and Denmark) around the turn of the century in debates around georgism, which contained an argument for the right to land and land as impot unique. In the US, georgism was influential on the idea of homesteading, which, for instance, Doherty sees as a core influence on libertarian ideas of the ‘Remnant’.¹⁸ This tradition was somehow lost as a young generation in the late 1970s and 1980s turned to the legacy of authors like Ayn Rand or Henri Lepage. Lepage’s Imorgon kapitalism, published in 1981 by Ratio and distributed through the libertarian book club, Timbro’s book shop Market Corner, and FMSF’ members, was a bestseller. Between 1978 and 1986, Ratio translated and published not only Rand and LePage but also Friedrich Hayek, Robert Nozick, Tibor Machan, Leonard Leggio and Pat Buchanan as well as an incendiary tract against social democrat economic policy by Gordon Tullock.¹⁹

The wealth of Timbro was key to this editorial activity, but the circulation of translated texts demonstrates that libertarians had succeded in creating new networks of predominantly young people. The very theme of being young in the welfare stateist setting was inscribed into the act of translation – it took after all some work to make Rand’s reflections on totalitarianism bear on a certes regulated, but nevertheless highly democratic political culture like Sweden, and it was this precise act of translation that took place in the mix of the text based and the vernacular, not least in the pages of Nyliberalen. Many of these authors were not known, or not well known, in Sweden and through Ratio’s publishing activity they were given almost mythical, subversive value (just as texts of Ayn Rand began their circulation in a kind of underground scene). Through the construction of this largely translated canon, texts from Austrian economists, publish choice and contract theorists became building stones of a revolutionary project that was otherwise directly embedded in banal representations of life as a young person in Sweden. Philosophical texts established a frame of representation for how life in a mainly urban environment like Stockholm in the 1980s could be reinterpreted, giving the everyday importance as a potentially revolutionary ‘John Galt’ type experience.²⁰

Through this mainly imported canon of iconic texts, natural rights became associated with absolute freedom and a new rationalist individual philosophy, in rupture with domestic traditions. Such a rupture opened the door to a complex play on temporalities – libertarians emphasized the revolution, but they often sought to argue through history that if only exposed to the right arguments or to new forms of affective sensations, the collectivist welfarist Swede would see the libertarian revolution as part of a rightful historical heritage. This explains the two-legged strategy, on the one hand, the cultural shock produced by imported texts, on the other the constant emphasis on the practical experience of being young. Texts became performances of their own as Ludwig von Mises, Rand and Murray Rothbard were introduced in commentary in stencilled newsletters and home printed magazines such as the Positivisten-newsletter that preceded Nyliberalen (a direct translation of Rand’s Positivist-newsletter). Commentary, translation and often direct clipping from American newsletters and journals was key. Nyliberalen closely resembled Rothbard’s journal Reason, which he began publishing for the Society for Individual Liberty from 1968 – clearly read by a small number of people in Sweden.²¹ Each number of Nyliberalen also reprinted Rothbard’s ‘RudeBarb’ comic strip, setting of little virtual bombs of inverted significance in the Swedish context.²²

Ideology work: popular culture as welfare state protest

By importing public choice theory and a reforged natural rights canon, libertarians orchestrated an in no way effortless translation from the critique of collectivism that had originated with Rand’s critique of Stalin-Leninism and Hayek’s warning of national socialism to the critique of a welfare statist model that for the most part of the post-war period had been praised internationally for its comparative individualism and market orientation. The result was a new interpretative frame in which the welfare state as inherently incompatible with individual freedom. In so doing, they displaced the repertoire of liberal language in ways that opened the door for an unfettered notion of the market – and this was, in turn, endogenized and naturalized in a new historiography from the late 1980s on, in which libertarians in fact also played a key role.²³ At the same time, many of the textual references were abstract, and they required a constant act of translation. In the pages of Nyliberalen and in the activities of its editorial board, the introduction of a neoconservative and libertarian canon met with a profound emphasis on popular culture. Constitutional links were made between a positive project of freedom and individual consumption of new goods and styles in music, cinema, sex or alcohol as a primary expression of that freedom. A major purpose of the early newsletter was to reach potential objectivist, rationalist inclined youth through the contact pages at the end of every newsletter. Advertising invited young people to buy mail order books, subscribe to newsletters, or come to meetings, for instance, to the libertarian dining club in Pizzeria Vesuvio at Hornsgatan.²⁴ It was not difficult to project revolutionary potential onto new forms of consumption. Nordic societies in the 1970s and 1980s were in fairness rather culturally dreary, with one state-owned TV channel until 1982 (then there were two), a monopoly on alcohol, strict credit and capital regulations, and a limited supply of food and entertainment in urban environments. As Niklas Olsen has argued, neoliberal arguments exploited a gap in Nordic political culture in a way that it had carefully held together worker and consumer interests.²⁵ This interwar compromise was broken up by inflation and wage drift in the period from the mid 1960s on, and these developments also eroded the symbolic status of working-class culture that had been a dominant factor through the post-war years. In its place came new forms of ownership and speculation, a political language markedly more globalist and cosmopolitan than before, and a cultural critique of welfare, state bureaucracies and corporatism. Where savings and frugality had been the markers of the parental generation, commercialism, spending and credit are now on the agenda.²⁶

At the same time, the regulation of consumption was an element of the welfare state that continued to grow, and in the period from the mid 1970s on, social regulation went to new interventionist lengths in the introduction of censorship laws on pornography and video (including not only censorship of violence but also the more controversial principle of censuring commercial message), by introducing parental insurance, extending a public ‘socialized’ day care system, and by adding VAT to consumer goods (first in 1968 and then in extended form in 1983). To libertarians, this was easily made into a paternalist attack on popular consumption and new ways of life. Forbidden and shunned objects such as the much-desired Jell-O (which Swedish authorities did not allow due to its toxic colouring agent) or the Hollywood film Dead Poet Society (the latter was not forbidden but accused in Swedish media of Americanization and ‘ego-cult’) became objects of symbolic transgression of established moral boundaries within the welfare state. Nyliberalen’s editorial committee pioneered the use of ‘the black market space’ for the distribution of cultural goods that were difficult to access. The black market space itself was an import from the American libertarian ‘Free market yellow pages’. In Sweden, where undeclared jobs, buying and selling apartment rental contracts, and the illegal distilling of alcohol were all highly present features in a young person’s life in the 1980s, the black market space was both symbolic oppositional space and practical provider of price goods, and so was the mail order service operated from the American book service Second Renaissance books, until Timbro opened Market Corner bookshop.

Certain elements of urban culture in ¨Stockholm of the early 1980s matter here. A biographical survey suggests that most of the libertarians came from middle-class background (some were exceptions - Nyliberalen’s Christian Gergils was the son of Håkan Gergils who was at this point the chairman of the shareholder association, Aktiespararna). Many became academics, writers and columnists. At the same time, Nyliberalen’s editorial committee clearly also included both the lower middle class and working class experiences – often expressed in a desire for mobility that seemed to go in the direct opposite direction from that of the parent generation. One interviewee described a deep utopian desire that was at odds with the social pragmatism of the welfare state. As a child, he spent long periods in hospital. There he developed a passion for science fiction and for literary descriptions of utopian and dystopian societies, which found a new source as he found Ayn Rand’s Anthem in a newspaper kiosk on the Ramblas in Barcelona while on a family holiday. He decided to translate it to Swedish and, as an adult, created a publishing house almost exclusively devoted to Rand texts. He also describes 1970s and 1980s Stockholm sci-fi culture, which spread through stencilled newsletters and a dedicated book shop in Stockholm’s Old Town.²⁷ Another interviewee says that in the 1980s, it was extremely important to be something.²⁸ Libertarianism was perhaps enough of an odd label that it offered to be someone in an otherwise torn politico-cultural landscape. The ongoing war between the synths and the punks did not clearly translate to political positions, but to be a libertarian was somehow to be distinct from both. The libertarian identity came first and foremost with cultural distinctions, such as a love of science fiction or a distinct interest for American culture.²⁹

These stories are different from existing accounts of, for instance, Murray Rothbard, whose main role in libertarianism internationally was probably his active diffusion of Rand’s texts, in particular after her death in 1982. Scandinavia was clearly receptive ground for circulation, no doubt because of the ongoing mobilization on the Right, but perhaps also because young libertarians from the Nordics sought American culture out. This arguably had to with the way that American consumerism figured in the 1980s as a veritable counterculture to Swedish welfare state culture – sometimes in extraordinary naïve ways, as when an interviewee describes that it was only decades later that he-she realized how culturally conservative was really the US.

In the pages of Nyliberalen figure, a distinct set of experiences that can be situated in a 1980s generation of urban city folks, most of them male but some notably female, born in the early to mid 1960s. They were the first generation to go through the so-called unitary school system, which had been created in 1960 to important liberal opposition. With study loans, they could go to university, where they found themselves in the largest cohort in history. Their parents had benefitted from the boom in construction and industry after the war, and most of them had grown up in a Swedish context that was divided by a very visible line between rent controlled publicly distributed apartments, and small house residential suburbs (the critique of rent control began in the late 1940s and its main proponent was Sven Rydenfelt, an early Swedish member of the Mont Pelèrin Society who joined Nyliberalen editorial committee in 1984, despite being significantly older than the others³⁰). They were also of the queue-generation, a social reality that was less dramatic in Sweden than in the USSR of course, but a cultural fact. 1980s society suffered from shortages in everything from the job market, where youth unemployment dominated the otherwise inflationary economy of the 1980s, to housing. The allocation of these goods was done on the basis of a public queue system. The dream of the 37, 5 square metre apartment, drawn up by social engineers in the 1930s, was far away. Ideas of the family were changing. In 1974, the social democrat government created the universal parental insurance, crowning a decade of work with the nationalization of child care in municipal day care centres. Around the election in 1982, a debate erupted on taxation, benefit culture and the socialized family.³¹

The 1980s consumerism shook up existing ideals of youth and pushed them from the left to the right end of the scale, and libertarians arguably led the way here as a new version of the young avantgarde. In the 1970s, a public debate had erupted in Sweden on the ‘alienation’ of urban youth in industrial society. The latter category was iconized in Stefan Jarl’s films about two dropout drug addicts in Sergels torg, Kenta and Stoffe. Kenta and Stoffe did heroin (while cocaine hit Stockholm night clubs just a few blocks away). Libertarians were in many ways the total anti-image of this – they did not hang in Sergels torg, one of their favourite spots instead was Gallerian, Stockholm’s first commercial mall (Gallerian was inaugurated in 1976 as a new space for both shopping and consumption of art and debate, but markedly in opposition to social democracy’s historic quarters at Norra Bantorget). In 1983, Nyliberalen’s editorial committee set up a drinking stall there and served illegal alcohol to shoppers. At the same time, the media landscape exploded through the video-revolution.³² In 1983, cinema censorship was extended to VCR-cassettes, and Nyliberalen objected to the ban on ‘commercial message’ being applied to pro-capitalist arguments.³³ VCR allowed for the diffusion of messages that could not circulate in Sweden’s publicly controlled media landscape (boards of Swedish television and Swedish radio were corporatist and socially democratically controlled). Ayn Rand’s lectures were diffused from Murray Rothbard’s Libertarian Society on audio and video cassette, and in Nyliberalen were painstaking attempts to fund the purchase of cassettes and an American videoplayer, and get these through customs. They got the cassettes, unfortunately not the machine.³⁴ When Swedish television refrained from buying Milton Friedman’s BBC-series Free to choose, it was purchased by Timbro on cassette and displayed during Free to choose-evenings at Market Corner. Another cultural war concerned the freedom of sexual relations; in Stockholm, raged in the early 1980s a war over pornography. Paradoxically, a wave of 1960s liberalization had created a perfectly entrepreneurial market place in sex shops and brothels in Stockholm, but it was targeted in the 1980s by feminists and city developers alike.³⁵ A new magazine culture appeared in the 1970s and early 1980s with soft porn magazines such as Aktuellt Rapport, in which a strange collusion could be found between a new genre of intellectual welfare state bashing and a posing for new sexual habits. For instance, an issue in 1983 portrayed the leftist writers and journalists Jan Guillou and Jörn Donner as the new ‘freedom fighters’.³⁶

In 1985, a court case against the Norwegian ‘Porn-king’ Leif I Hagen pushed a group of young women in Nyliberalen’s editorial committee to protect the magazine in news kiosks and arrange counterdemonstrations against feminist attacks.³⁷ Porn was only one way of attacking a whole set of regulations understood undermining freedom of speech – the most important one being the many subventions to various cultural magazines and associations that formed the backbone of Swedish cultural policy. A ‘market place of ideas’ meant the best argument could win, also commercially.³⁸ Among these arguments were also a new version of globalism that was markedly tuned to the US and broke with Sweden’s symbolic geopolitical position as a Cold War in-between model. Libertarians objected to social democracy’s targeted direction of Third world aid towards resistance movements, which they portrayed as an ambition to spread ‘benefit culture’ globally. South African ANC had substantial support in Swedish social democracy – but libertarians and young conservatives launched a series of debates from the mid-1980s on the potential of a post-apartheid South Africa with independent market-oriented cantons. A note from Libertarian international’s 1984 congress refers to plans to turn South Africa into a ‘libertarian state’. Also Switzerland, land of direct democracy and international tax evasion, was hailed as a future model for Sweden.³⁹

In the US libertarianism coexisted with the New Left until about 1970, when leading libertarians such as Murray Rothbard separated from the New Left, which he now understood as a primitive counterculture that did not seek to transcend the existence of a social state and therefore lacked true revolutionary potential. Rothbard turned to a new radicality in an enlightened sphere of individualism.⁴⁰ Quinn Slobodian underscores the role played in Rothbard’s individualist conception by biologist arguments, redeployed in a racialized critique of mass education and leftist youth culture. In Sweden, libertarians emphasized their difference with the labour youth organizations and with the 1968 generation, often described in gendered terms as boring or even frigid feminists and Third worlders. Libertarians were unashamedly elitist in their critique of both mass education and welfare statist culture as a form of stupidifying solidarity.⁴¹ Against this, they bounced their message of ‘egoism’, or ‘positive individualism’, a notion that could not, it was said, be understood from within welfare statist culture but held the key to a form of radical individual awakening.⁴² The awakening (below) was apparently without class position, its preconditions departing only in individual choice. The terms were directly taken from Rand, for whom individualism figured as the goal of a higher process of transcendence. The liberation of the individual, through the rationalist use of intellect and the ‘seeing through’ of the smoke screens of collectivism, was the source of the awakening. School was a major problem here (a decade before the Bildt-government introduced Milton Friedman’s school vouchers). Arguments concerned the unjust character in an education ‘same for all’, the propagandist purposes of state sanctioned teaching books (a much discussed point was that high-school books only mentioned capitalism in the negative) and a politically controlled curriculum. School, parents, bureaucracy, culture – everything came together in what was portrayed as a totalitarian grey goo of welfare boredom. After the murder of Olof Palme in 1986, his successor Ingvar Carlsson, who was often represented as boring in the press, but in a positive way, became a favourite target of scorn, as in the poem that figured in Nyliberalen in 1990,

Vomit

I don’t care about the fog

A system to hate

Unfreedom must be refused by drink, and by rejection of poetic style

I write as I like

The system is to obey

Homogenity. Similarity, People-arity.

One people, one führer.

A people’s home. An Ingvar. Tragic figure of majority dictatorship. Bet he likes cats.

Lights are on. Sunday in the welfare state. Hungover in a welfare city.⁴³

To be young was in a sense in itself a radical rupture and transcendence. Drugs, music and commercialism were all forms of escapism. Contrary to the cyberculture and tech-utopianism that libertarianism eventually spawned, its original view of transcendence was eminently political, as it placed the site of transcendence in the individual capacity to reconsider his or hers social situation and embeddedness.⁴⁴ To awaken was a political project, even when its goal was the demise of politics as known. In this manner, to be a libertarian was to infuse youth not only with a sense of pride and activism, but actually with revolutionary potential.

The awakening

The use of objects and artefacts that encapsulated a break in generational experience and projected utopian visions of market freedom was not random but inscribed, in the pages of Nyliberalen, in an ideological strategy that aimed at orchestrating the conditions for a process often described as ‘waking up’, the ‘end of sleep’, or the ‘awakening’.⁴⁵ In American libertarian culture, the idea of the Remnant – that there existed sleepwalking heirs of an earlier, purist moment of freedom fight in the constitution of the American federation, played a key role. American libertarians could thus rely on what they saw as a deeply engrained, albeit dormant, revolutionary consciousness in the American mind.⁴⁶ In contrast, Swedish libertarians thought this instinct did not exist and that it had rather been eradicated through the history of welfare stateism, and that the universal role that therefore fell onto them was to create the preconditions for a popular awakening.⁴⁷

Swedish libertarians were convinced that welfare stateism as cultural experience was in essence totalitarian, that it had squeezed out all other possible experiences, feelings and memories, and that they had to create the conditions for a kind of shock confrontation individual freedom. Welfare citizens could not imagine alternatives to a hegemonic collectivist culture. These alternatives were situated therefore, either in a historical past of laissez faire arguments, or, in various individual utopian projections that included a variety of forms of expansion of the mind. Since most Swedes, they argued, were ‘sleepwalkers’ that could not wake up on their own accord, so ‘drugged’ were they, the awakening was a revolutionary process. It necessitated an avantgarde, which could orchestrate a break in consciousness through practical and performance-oriented demonstrations. The many performance events discussed in the pages of Nyliberalen were intended to bridge the gap from philosophical text to the concrete manifestation of a possible future reality. Often, the aim was to demonstrate the absurdity of welfare state regulation by enacting a symbolic breach of some kind: the alcohol stand is a prime example of this, as was inciting individuals to commit misdemeanours, for instance in the boycott of the national census, Folk och bostadsräkningen 1985, or by replacing the tax form with the form prestamped ‘fraud’ distributed in Nyliberalen in 1993.⁴⁸

Alcohol played a key role in these discussions on the Awakening. Through the editorial committee of Nyliberalen, one could request parts for a small scale distillery machine entitled Otto and make moonshine.⁴⁹ This played in a complex way on Swedish traditional culture. Home distilleries were by no means a new thing – but Otto was nothing like the big handcrafted copper tank that my grandfather had in the basement, it was a small machine that could be placed in the kitchen of a small urban apartment. To get drunk was thus no longer antisocial behaviour and not ‘alienation’, but a new kind of radical sociality by empowerment and choice, indeed an entry into another world. As such it was intended to break with the idea of drug use as a manifestation of a pathological youth culture, and rather project ideas of drugs as carriers of a new and ‘objective’ view of social reality. In this objective view, there were only the natural rights of the individual, and the gigantic social experiment of the welfare state thus appeared absurd.

By the same token, the editorial committee of Nyliberalen created the illegal nightclub TritNaHa on Fridhemsplan in 1986, where the editorial committee was also housed and where materials were confiscated by police on multiple occasions in the late 1980s and early 1990s.⁵⁰ Over the counter hung a banner, Du har fulla rättigheter.⁵¹ Other things appeared to advocate a kind of market fetishism as part of a radical anti-version of social democrat feminism. An object for sale through Nyliberalen for instance was RedEye, eye drops used by supermodels in the US to reduce redness. Frequent references in Nyliberalen were to a kind of free and rationalized sex and to a new form of emotional and romantic liberation. Timbro translated and published Nathaniel Branden’s book Den romantiska kärlekens psykologi in 1985. At times references to sex included violent and misogynistic expressions, such as in the imagined ceremonial rape of a (named) social democrat official employed at the cinema censure.⁵²

The front. Exploding the conflict lines of welfare stateism

This performance-based strategy mimicked propaganda methods that had been pioneered in the US by the Goldwater campaign in 1964, used in the Reagan campaign and the neoconservative surge in the early 1980s, and that were brought to Sweden in the late 1970s and early 1980s as not least Timbro made a new use of campaign methods such as political advertising, buttons, and performances. By 1983 and 1984, the conservative party and Timbro showed a new appreciation for young libertarian radicals, and messages that had years before been understood as shocking were tapered to Stockholm buses in the context of the wage earner funds resistance campaign in 1983: ‘positive individualism’, ‘satsa på dig själv’, and ‘bryt Jantelagen’.⁵³ In the last years of the 1980s, Nyliberalen clearly benefited from new funds, the editorial committee opened a nightclub, Tritnaha, and in 1989, they created the political organization Frihetsfronten, The Freedom Front.⁵⁴ The Freedom Front was not a party, but something like the political manifestation of the idea of the awakening. Unlike the American situation, there seemed in 1989 to be no real outlet for libertarians in Swedish party politics. They were too radical for the Right and at least officially shunned by the Conservative Party. In the beginnings of Nyliberalen in previous years, there was often the attitude that there should be no regrets for this outsider position, as Swedish political life with its emphasis on social compromise and welfare capitalism would mean a certain death for libertarianism. In the editorial committee from 1989 on was Stigbjörn Ljunggren, political scientist and commentator whose doctoral thesis, Folkhemskapitalismen, argued in 1992 that Swedish conservatism had sided with the welfare state to the detriment of genuinely liberal positions.⁵⁵

Within the Front, the awakening was understood to be a question of a slow cultural revolution, which could not take place from within politics but necessarily had to explode politics from somewhere in an outside consciousness. The Freedom Front was thus constructed not as a revolutionary vanguard, the purpose of which was not to seek political influence, but to guide those individuals who actively sought out libertarian ideas towards their freedom. It was clearly inspired by Goldwater’s 1964 call to a certain kind of revolution.⁵⁶ Goldwater’s promise was to explode liberalism through an antiwelfare state campaign. This promise catered both to small business owners and working-class family fathers, a composite of alliances pretty far from the educated avantgarde pictured by Rothbard.⁵⁷ In the aftermath of Goldwater, American libertarianism split over tensions such as the positivist notion, which was at odds with the religious component in neoconservatism, the divide between anarcho-capitalist radicality vs. policy influence, and views on the long and short term. In Sweden, the creation of the Front, paradoxically in fact, rather marked the beginning of the end of libertarian independence, and a new ideological affinity between libertarians, neoconservatives and neoliberals before the pivotal election in 1991.

A core premise to the Front in 1989 was the idea that the conditions of welfare statism were such that no alternative could exist. Collectivism offered no alternative and therefore no politics. This led libertarians to reject the Left Right divide. The Front logo, an arrow that cut through a left right plane, expressed this sentiment and the idea that all forms of political action had to take place through the explosion of the Left Right dimension and the ascension of a metapolitical cleavage, that they increasingly formulated in terms of a binary opposition between all forms of statism (including social conservatism) and absolute freedoms, foremost embodied by pluralist market arrangements. Within this position was a fundamental critique of social conservatism as bound to corporatist arrangements, which grew also within the conservative party over the latter half of the 1980s. Ideological distinctions became clear over the issue of privatization. To libertarians, the privatization debate within the conservative party demonstrated the divide between their radical critique of statism and conservative positions that mainly spoke for the opening up of market alternatives within existing public sector arrangements. At this point, they were tempted rather by the populist project carried in the Swedish 1991 election by Ny demokrati, but its racism clashed with what was still a strong cosmopolitan stance (among both libertarians and neoliberals). By the early 1990s, however, the Front had become a palatable alternative on the Swedish Right, not as a political party, but as the truth sayers and fanbearers of what was now mainly referred to as ‘neoliberalism’. In 1990, the Freedom Front organized an exhibition on the future site of the rave club Docklands in Stockholm harbour. The exhibit featured the new ‘Front’ which was showcased as a blowing up of all sorts of inhibitions and bans. At this point the subversive message was a facade. The Front was no longer a marginal phenomenon – the exhibit opening was attended by conservative ministers (and the odd social democrat one too), speech writers, liberal columnists and cultural elite.⁵⁸

Image from Nyliberalen 2–3 1990.

The neoliberal position seemed to offer openings for a fusion between the more popular market vision of libertarians, and the professed ambition on the Right; to use a return to power in order to build a ‘market economy’. The latter, Timbro argued, had to be created by changing the terms of debate and by creating new visions of market freedoms in the Swedish psyche. The market economy needed a new ideology to be born. And in this project, the youthful market culture that libertarians had constructed was of interest. The conservative party leader Gösta Bohman (1970–81) integrated neoliberal ideas in his platform in the early 1980sin particular, through two notions, both taken from Hayek – that the state had caused a new kind of social insecurity and that there was a new form of positive individualism that held a different promise from social democrat representations of society as in a state of collective crisis and disrepair.⁵⁹ In 1984, Bohman held a speech in Tallin that spoke directly of the market economy as the only possible organizational structure for freedom. Business freedoms, it said, were natural rights, and the underpinning of a pluralist society, in opposition to majority rule. In the program revision inside the conservative party in 1985, neoliberalism was now a declared choice, and in its aftermath, a new generation of conservative party intellectuals who had gravitated around Timbro began preparing the 1988 and 1991 elections on the explicit theme of the market economy against the ‘socialized system’. They thought the Scandinavian countries were the next step after the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions.

During the years of the Bildt-government in the early 1990s, Ratio’s philosophical editorial activities lost in importance in relation to near constant Timbro campaigning around themes of a tax revolt, entrepreneurship culture, and all forms of ownership. Daniel Bessner describes how, in the US, Koch-funding steered libertarians towards a more institutionalized form of neoconservatism, and how in consequence purists such as Rothbard or Leonard Liggio were ejected. ⁶⁰ At least Liggio had a decisive influence in Sweden: Rothbard’s Libertarian Society developed an international branch sometime in 1982 or 1983, and held world conventions in Brussels, Oslo, Copenhagen and Stockholm. The Stockholm conference was held in direct proximity to the Mont Pelèrin conference, also in Stockholm, and both Liggio and Gordon Tullock participated in the first ‘Freedom Academy’ organized by Timbro on Stockholm’s University Campus Frescati in 1986 (together with Henri Lepage, Tibor Machan, and the South African Leon Louw).⁶¹

At the same time, Nyliberalen changed from black and white newsletter to four colour magazine, with striking resemblance to a new print culture of glossy magazines that at this point also appeared. In the early 1990s, there was even something of a magazine war – new outlets like the Moderna tider review, which intellectualized neoliberal arguments as a kind of radical cultural critique, were met with new leftist reviews such as the rather insignificant TLM, started in 1992.⁶² Nyliberalen increasingly ressembled a music or film magazine, the philosophical texts were now mainly absent.

Privatization was hotly debated in these magazines – but as Timbro began drawing up the program for the Bildt-reforms from 1991 on, privatization rapidly changed nature from an emphasis on pluralization of society, to a blueprint for a new set of contractual arrangements between the welfare state and a new emerging set of market-industrial entities.⁶³ This process put a squeeze on libertarian arguments: on the one hand, the editorial committee of Nyliberalen was revolted by the state bail out of the Swedish banks in the summer of 1992. On the other, the prospect of an actual market revolution allowed for the dream that marketization would instrumentally pave the way for the real project of individual freedom and natural law. In a remarkable echo of Marxists and socialists before them, some libertarians came to accept even market statism as a means to an end and as a pivot for the ‘long term’, while others put more distance between themselves and politics.

How libertarianism died, almost. Concluding remarks

With the ascendance of neoliberalism to power, libertarians had to choose, and recent work has shown that the libertarian milieu fragmented after 1992, as some joined party headquarters, some became speech writers and columnist for the leading conservative daily Svenska Dagbladet, and others disappeared to the US or ventured deeper into philosophy, editorial work or even more radical forms of transcendence. In the mid 1990s the magazine Nyliberalen became associated with a new electronic environment and a set of mailing lists, joined by a radical freedom of speech stance propagated by the server hotel Piratbyrån. This environment was key to the development of a number of new fractions on the right, including the webplatform Flashback, currents of neo-Nazism, but also a radical reincarnation of the Freedom front.⁶⁴ In the early 1990s part of the editorial committee behind Nyliberalen also created the rave club Docklands, in Stockholm harbour. At Docklands, dance and drugs replaced the philosophical Awakening.⁶⁵ In 1994, another member of Nyliberalen’s editorial committee planted a bomb at Stockholm’s Millesgården in protest of the city’s bid for the Olympics.⁶⁶

The thinktank Timbro, propped up by the funds of the Business Federation, exercised a heavy influence on the development of neoliberal and libertarian ideas in Sweden – and still do.⁶⁷ Libertarians had come together around the rejection of the idea of power. But the absence of the idea of power left a vacuum, and libertarians left themselves open here to a set of contradictions that can be found in libertarianism also in its US context but that had specific characteristics in Sweden. Paradoxically, to impose the idea of a supreme individual in a society in which collectivist values were dominant and freedom had never been a key political concept did require power, in symbolic, financial and institutional form. Such power existed in Timbro. But the fact that Timbro had all the power must be seen as fatal to the development of libertarian arguments, which after the 1990s have a reoccurring but highly marginal place in political debate, oftentimes today in defence of cosmopolitanism and in critique of nationalist and anti-migration stances on the Right. Sweden’s turn to the populist far Right came later than in Norway and Denmark, and indeed, the integration of neoliberal and ethno-populist arguments in the mainstream right was another challenge to libertarians. The ideological frame of neoliberalism has proved able to encompass biologist, native and racist arguments, in a way that has turned some libertarians in Sweden into proverbial voices in the wilderness. Most importantly, the Timbro revolution transformed the relationship between the idea of freedom, and the idea of the market in Swedish politics. Libertarian arguments were instrumental to Timbro’s neoliberalism, because the ideas of positivism, individualism and natural rights that libertarians found in Rand’s work offered openings for a popularization of the market in Swedish public culture.⁶⁸ I have shown that this popularization worked through the vernacular, in ways that are dramatically different from how, for instance, intellectual historians have emphasized the ‘thought collectives’ of elite neoliberal academic networks.⁶⁹ At the same time, however, the integration of libertarian arguments within neoliberal ideology meant that a certain liberal repertoire, which in itself shared an important strand of anti-statist welfare critique with anarchist and liberalist strands in Nordic political history, could not develop outside of the market dogma. What had been a youthful rebellion against the larger social compromise of welfare statism was absorbed into an over time increasingly socially and culturally conservative neoliberalism. Ayn Rand was forgotten, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock became frequent guests. Libertarian’s emphasis on self resilience, on individual virtue, and on freedom, could have found alliances in other prevailing -isms in Swedish society, not least the turn to decentralization that marked left wing debates in the same period. But the radical nature of the market metaphor that resulted from the compromise between libertarianism and neoliberalism made such alliances impossible. The enduring relevance of libertarianism in Nordic culture lay in the legitimation of a market notion, which in the subsequent years became a dominant trope in public life. As metaphor, this market trope came with the active creation of market culture, in which many of the ideas introduced in Nyliberalen (a school system organized around choice, deregulation of the tv monopoly, the deregulation of alcohol) became new social facts. It was easier for neoliberals to accept this popularized market, than libertarian’s original insistence on natural rights, a near absolute form of individual autonomy, and pronounced cultural relativism.

As neoliberalism emerged instead as dominant language on the Right in the 1990s and 2000s, libertarians were marginalized with but a few exceptions. The transition from libertarianism to neoliberalism meant that a range of arguments that were important to libertarians – sexual freedom, consumption, freedom of expression, an open cultural sphere, cosmopolitan values and free migration – fell away behind a dominant idea of the market – but this market was mostly detached from debate of its political nature. To libertarians, the market was an expression of a political form, a pluralist democracy that had to be in a constant state of conflict with majority rule. ⁷⁰ It makes sense therefore to distinguish absolutely between libertarianism and neoliberalism as ideologies – and consider the rapprochement between their political projects as a matter of historical contingency and power play.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

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

Notes

1. S. Brandes, ’The Market’s People. Milton Friedman and the Making of Neoliberal Populism’, in, Callison and Manfredi, (eds.) Mutant Neoliberalism. Market Rule and Political Capture (New York: Fordham University Press) pp. 61–89.

2. M. Freeden, The New Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); M. Hedin, Ett liberalt dilemma (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2002).

3. R. Westerberg, Socialists at the gate (Stockholm University Diss., 2020). J. Andersson, ‘Creating the Market Economy. Timbro’s Cultural Revolution’ (in review).

4. J. Norberg, Den svenska liberalismens historia. T. Nilsson, Mellan arv och utopi. Svensk höger under hundra år (Stockholm: Santerus, 2004).

5. Ratio – tidskrift för Fria Moderata Studentförbundet, 1981–1985, see for instance nr. 2 and 4, 1981.

6. S. B. Ljunggren, Högern att lita på (Stockholm: Hjalmarsson och Högberg, 2006).

7. K. Boréus, Högervåg (Stockholm: Tiden, 1994).

8. K. Phillips Fein, Invisible hands. The making of the conservative movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: WW Norton, 2009). B. Jackson, Thinktank archipelago, in N. Olsen and H. S. Forberg, eds. Reinventing Western Civilization. Transnational Reconstructions of Liberalism in Europe in the 20^th Century (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp. 119–212; Westerberg, Socialists at the Gate; B. Jackson and F. S. Braithwaite, eds. The Neoliberal Age? Britain since the 1970s (London: UCL Press, 2021).

9. Notes from trip to America, Archives of the Swedish Employers Association (SAF), Samhällspolitiska avdelningen, vols. F 14NA2. Centrum för Näringslivshistoria, Stockholm.

10. Ljunggren, Högern att lita på; Norberg, Den svenska liberalismens historia.

11. Nyliberalen 1, 1983. Pagination is unreliable in these early issues.

12. A. Gamble, ‘Economic libertarianism’, M. Freeden, L. T. Sargent, and M. Stears, eds. Political Handbook of Ideologies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) pp. 412–422.

13. See M. Cooper, Family values. Between neoliberalism and the new social conservatism (London: Zone books, 2017). M. Cooper, ‘The Alt-right, neoliberalism, and the fascist temptation’, Theory, Culture and Society, 00-1-22.

14. Among the diverse publications of the libertarian milieu were also the newsletter ‘Positivisten’ and the magazine Ego. Over time, a number of physical meeting places and electronic fora appeared. S. Bäckman, Frihetens nattväktar (Master thesis, Department of the History of Ideas, Uppsala University, 2023).

15. Hamowy, The Encyclopaedia of Libertarianism.

16. L. Runefelt, Dygden som välståndets grund. Dygd, nytta och egennytta i frihetstidens ekonomiska tänkande (Stockholm, Diss., 2005). J. Christensson, Lyckoriket. Studier i svensk upplysning (Stockholm: Atlantis, 1996).

17. J. Norberg, Den svenska liberalismens historia.

18. Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism; J. Jensen, ‘Repurposing Mises. Murray Rothbard and the Birth of Anarchocapitalism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 83, 2, (2022), pp. 315–332.

19. See F. Hayek, Vägar till träldom (Stockholm: Timbro, 1978) H. Lepage’s Imorgon kapitalism (Stockholm: Timbro, 1981) was a national bestseller.

20. ’Vem är John Galt?’ Nyliberalen 3–4 1986.

21. J. Burns, Goddess of the Market. Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); A. Tran, ‘Radicals for capitalism. Ayn Rand and youth during the 1960s’, UC Berkeley Research papers, 2011.

22. R. Hylkema, Rudebarbs (New York: Books in focus inc., 1979).

23. M. Freeden, Liberal Languages. Ideological Imaginaries and 20^th Century Progressive Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). B. Jackson and M. Stears, eds. Liberalism as Ideology. Essays in Honour of Michael Freeden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

24. ’Libertarian dinner club’ Nyliberalen 1, 1986.

25. N. Olsen, The Sovereign Consumer (Cham: Springer International, 2019).

26. Larsson Heidenblad and Husz, ‘The making of everyman’s capitalism’.

27. Interview 1, April 6, 2020. J.H. Holmberg, Framtiden inför rätta. Berättelser om morgondagen (Stockholm: Timbro, 1984); JH. Holmberg, Befria människan (Stockholm: Fria Moderata Studentförbundet, 1985). A. Rand, Hymn, (Stockholm: Lindfors förlag, 1983); J.H. Holmberg, ’Ayn Rand’, Komplex. Humanistiska föreningens tidskrift, 4, (1970), pp.

28. Interview 2, August 14, 2020.

29. K. Mattson, ‘Did Punk matter? Analyzing the practices of a youth subculture during the 1980s’, American Studies, 42, 1, (2001), pp. 69–97.

30. ’Frihet, jämlikhet och fria marknader på alla livets områden’, Nyliberalen 4, 1985.

31. B. Stråth, Mellan två fonder (Stockholm: Atlas, 1998); F. Sejersted, The Age of Social Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021); Boréus, Högervåg. ‘Förfallets rötter, Nyliberalen 1 1985.

32. A. Burman and L. Lennerhed, eds., Sekelslut. Idéhistoriska perspektiv på 80- och 90-talen (Stockholm: Atlas, 2011).

33. ’Censur i folkhemmet’, Nyliberalen 1 1984, and ’Filmcensur’, Nyliberalen 1, 1985.

34. ’Censur i folkhemmet’, Nyliberalen 1 1984.

35. K. Arnberg, ’Allt ska bort. Avhysningen av porrklubbar i Stockholm efter 1980’, forthcoming in J. Andersson. O. Husz, N. Glover and D. Larsson Heidenblad, Marknadens tid (Lund: Nordic Academic Press).

36. Nyliberalen 1, 1983.

37. ’Kvinnor för yttrandefrihet’, Nyliberalen 4 1985.

38. ’Varför frihet?’, Nyliberalen 2, 1984.

39. P.T. Bauer, Biståndsmyten. Studier i u-landsbiståndets ekonomi (Stockholm: Timbro, 1984); Nyliberalen 1, 1984, and ’Referat av andra mötet i Libertarian international’, Nyliberalen 3 1984. Timbro published Leon Louw’s South Africa: the Solution, in Swedish translation in 1987.

40. 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; D. Bessner, ‘Murray Rothbard, political strategy, and the making of modern libertarianism’, Intellectual History Review, 24, 4, (2014) pp. 441–456. G, Gerstle, The Neoliberal Order. America and the world in the free market era (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 154.

41. ‘Skolan – tortyrkammare före de ambitiösa’, Nyliberalen 2 1985.

42. ”Varför frihet”, Nyliberalen 2 1984,”Ditt eget ansvar”, Nyliberalen 2 1985.

43. Nyliberalen nr 2–3 1990, 66.

44. F. Turner, From counterculture to cyberculture. Stewart Brand. The Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, Chicago 2006. A. Taillandier, ‘Staring into the singularity” and other posthuman tales: Transhumanist stories of future change’, History and Theory, 60, 2, (2021) pp. 215–233.

45. A later Swedish conservative prime minister who came from the libertarian milieu in FMSF later used these metaphors in the book Det sovande folket, but these were translations from Rand’s literary descriptions of totalitarianism. ‘De terminerades riksförbund’, Nyliberalen 4, 1985; F. Reinfeldt. Det sovande folket (Stockholm: Moderata Ungdomsförbundet, 2002).

46. Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism.

47. Bessner, ‘Murray Rothbard’.

48. ’Skatt är stöld’, Nyliberalen, 1, 1993.

49. ’Konsumentrapport Otto’, and ’Hembränning – en kul och hederlig hobby’, Nyliberalen 3, 1989.

50. ’Frihetsfronten och Norrmalmspolisen’, Expressen, 19920908. ’Rättegången’, Nyliberalen 2, 1993.

51. Fulla rättigheter in Swedish refers to an alcohol licence but means ‘full rights’.

52. 1, 1986.

53. Timbro, F21K vol. 1. Archives of the Swedish Business Federation SAF, Centrum för näringslivshistoria, Stockholm.

54. ’Detta är frihetsfronten’, Nyliberalen, 1 1990; Visionen om det civiliserade samhället. Frihetsfrontens manifest (Stockholm: Frihetsfronten, 1990).

55. L. Sunnercrantz, Hegemony and the intellectual function. Medialized public discourse on privatization in Sweden 1988–1993, (Lund University PhD. Diss, 2017); S. Ljunggren, Folkhemskapitalismen. Den svenska högerns programutveckling under efterkrigstiden (Stockholm: Tiden, 1992).

56. J. Matthews, ‘To defeat a maverick. The Goldwater candidacy revisited, 1963–1964’, Presidential Studies Quarterly, 27, 4 (1997), pp. 662–68.

57. Cooper, Family values.

58. Nyliberalen nr 2–3 1990.

59. T. Lifvendahl, Gösta Bohman. Hjälten och myten, (Stockholm: Pejling, 2009); T. Aronson, ’Gösta Bohman, konservatismen och demokratin’, Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift, 91, 4, (1988).

60. Burns, American Goddess, and Bessner, ‘Murray Rothbard’.

61. ’Riktigt stora namn’, Nyliberalen nr 3–4, 1986.

62. Thélème, tidskrift för radikal debatt, 1–2, 1992.

63. Compare A. Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism, 1988.

64. Bäckman,’Frihetens nattväktare’. Jan Axelsson, Flashback News Agency (Stockholm: Underjordiska slumtryckeriet, 1998).

65. ’Docklands, historien om ravekultur, knark och en OS bomb’, P3 Dokumentär, Sveriges radio, 2009.

66. Compare, S. Fleming, ‘The Unabomber and the origins of anti-tech radicalism’, in Journal of Political Ideologies, 2021, 1–19.

67. See J A. Marceta, ’Svenska liberaler måste slå sig fria från Timbro’, Den nya mitten, May 17, 2023.

68. D. Larsson Heidenblad and O. Husz, ‘The making of everyman’s capitalism in Sweden. Mico infrastructures, unlearning, and moral boundary work,’ Enterprise and Society, 41, (2021), pp. 1–30.

69. D. Plewhe and P. Mirowski, The Road from Mont Pèlerin. The making of the neoliberal thought collective (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

70. This should not be exaggerated but is often put forward by libertarians themselves, see R. Hamowy, The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, (New York: Cato Institute and Sage, 2009); B. Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A freewheeling History (New York: Hachette, 2009). ‘Principprogram’, Nyliberalen, nr 1, 1983.