Högskolestiftelser. Förslaget att driva svenska universitet i stiftelseform ­öppnar för bolagisering. Men det är ingen riktig utredning, utan en politisk pamflett utan ­eftertanke. Privatisering av universitet hotar både oberoendet, forskningskvaliteten och samhällsnyttan, skriver 36 forskare vid svenska högskolor och universitet.

This dissertation emphasises the importance of the Swediesh priesthood during the 1600s, when the Kingdom was developing into an early modern state. I am looking from a new perspective, based on the Lutheran Right Doctrine, but concerning a way of thinking in and about the society. This way of thinking was characterised by an ideology, an ideology transmitted by the clergy and consequently making them necessary to the aims of political power. I have been pursuing an overarching idea within a field rich in sources and authorities to be found amongst priests in all their contexts. In questions of history and theology I have let specialised researchers have their say or I have stressed my own differing opinion based on the perspective of my own inquiry.

The phrase from Corinthians 1.14: "Let all things be done decently and in order", introducing the Church Regulations of 1571, provided a long-lasting confirmation of the priesthood´s´ own leadership and authority of and within the church.

The 1593 Uppsala meeting of representatives of all the country´s estates took the famous decision of confessional unity in Church and State. Unity provided the theological and ideological premises for the clergy, and especially the episcopacy, to seize the leadership of society in a way that led to opposition, not only from the reigning king but also from the nobility. Furthermore the very first paragraph of the first 1634 Consitution of Sweden confirmed the Lutheran Confession and Catechism as part of the fundamental law. In 1650 privileges were finally awarded to the clergy by the Queen who, in addition to very distinctly recommending consensus in any kind of decision, also strengthened the clergy´s position in community by endowing them the authority of legal leadership. Consensus was defined in different ways according to context and did not imply democracy.

Consequently the church was able to construct a new professionalism for the priesthood, based on the Right Doctrine, scholarship, education of their own members and on instruction in the catechism. All of which implied morality, responsibility, workning obediently and cooperating in a peaceful society under the watchful eyes of God and his ministers. Simultaneously, the Kingdom began to take a modern shape through organising its activities and power in a centralised bureaucracy. Uniformity, not consensus, became the keyword. It is important to remember however, throughout the 1600s the clergy maintained the conviction that there were different realms and hierarchies in this world, the secular and the spiritual, Moses and Aaron, together in God´s Israel. But the men of the church usually took God´s congregation to mean Sweden with its imperial conquests as well as each parish community. However the King`s Church Law of 1686 made the priests officials of the State. Consequently this dissertation discusses the reception of that Law. 

The subject of this thesis is the Swedish animal welfare movement, its origin and early development 1875-1920. The first national Swedish animal welfare society was formed in Stockholm 1875. It was soon followed by other associations for the protection of animals. The animal welfare movement grew rapidly in Sweden. Not until towards the 1920s did the membership decline.

The material studied in this thesis consists of a broad variety of documents from the animal welfare societies, such as journals and books as well as children's stories and parliamentary publications. The aim is to study both the origins and early development in Sweden of societies for the protection of animals, wild and domestic, during the decades around the turn of the century. The Swedish debates on animal welfare laws are of interest as well as discussions about vivisection and slaughter. The aim is to provide a wider analysis by taking various ideas and groups of people, such as veterinarians, schoolteachers and women into account.

The present thesis is based on the life and works of H.F. Spak, known as ”the socialist priest”. He started out as a conservative priest, became a Social Democrat and was forced to resign from the church in 1911. He became a leftwing agitator and later a Communist and atheist.

In his earlier days H.F. Spak tried to combine Christianity with Socialism, claiming that the two shared the same faith.The quest for justice and for equality seemed for him all the same, as well as the final goal: to establish the kingdom of God on earth. After his resignation from the church, he became increasingly influenced by non-Christian thinkers like Karl Marx naturally, but also Charles Darwin and Friedrich Nietzsche and others. These new influences he tried to combine with the message av Jesus Christ, who gradually lost lois role as a saviour of souls and became the ideal man, another in the line of the great heroes in human history, alongside men lika Buddha, Babeuf and Lenin.

In the beginning of the 1920 he abandoned the last remnants of Christianity. Gods was replaced by History, which, in his deterministic view, as God ruled everything: society as well as and the minds of every human being. At last he even lost his faith in History and the future communist society. He left the Communist Party of Sweden and six month after that he died.

The life and works of H.F. Spak are here mainly seen as an illustrative example of the efforts to combine Christianity and Socialism and even more of the similarities between the two doctrines: Socialism as a secular religion.

This paper has two objectives. First: the humanistic idea of knowledge, philosophically formulated by Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), should be presented in relation to history of ideas. In the meeting with different kinds of cultural and social needs in Central Europe during the decades of the turn of the 20th century, Steiner developed his idea of knowledge into a singular Thought Style (Ge. Denkstil). A Thought Style can be described as a selective and aimed cognitive preparedness. The idea of knowledge and the Thought Style are here described as anthroposophical humanism. The second objective is to show how the Thought Style, in a historical way, was established in Sweden, and how it, until the mid 1980s, changed and was adapted to Swedish culture, i.e. how the style in various ways became Swedish.

Organisations and movements that were influenced by the anthroposophical humanism were The Anthroposophical Society, the biodynamic movement, the movement for anthroposophic medicine, the medical pedagogical movement with special pedagogical institutions and social therapeutic homes for treatment, the Waldorf movement, the Christian Society, anthroposophic architecture and art practice etc. Since they co-operated with a common background, they formed a Thought Collective (Ge. Denkkollektiv).

The anthroposophical humanism has its roots relating to history of ideas far back in the Central European Middle Ages. During the new humanism era, the idea of knowledge had a renaissance in German culture life. Rudolf Steiner remodelled the idea at the end of the 19th century and developed it into the singular Thought Style. When Steiner was a theosophical teacher he gave it an esoteric design. After the First World War, when Steiner was working as a social reformer, he gave it a humanistic design. Within The Anthroposophical Society, the double image of the anthroposophical movement, internationally and in Sweden, led to severe opposition and conflicts. Right until the mid 1980s, reorganisations were common in order to handle the two directions of the Thought Style when it came to differences in traditions, ideology and sociology.

In Sweden, the anthroposophical movement has undergone four stages of development: the reception period 1890-1935, the conversion period 1935-55, the expansion period 1955-1985 and the integration period as from 1985. As from 1913, when The Anthroposophical Society was established, until 1985, the development of ideas in the anthroposophical Thought Style and the Thought Collective can be described as a wandering from Christian esotericism to an anthroposophical humanistic idea of knowledge, with a cultural education in the ideological focus of the Thought Style. The traditional development of ideas can also be described as an anthroposophical process of secularisation. There are mainly four things that have contributed to the expansion of the anthroposophical movement in Sweden during the phase of expansion: the post-war period economic expansion, the development of the educational system, the renaissance of esotericism in the late 1960s, as well as the need for an alternative to the post-war abundance consumerism and waste of resources. The Swedish development indicates similarities with the international development within those areas where different activities have been adapted to Swedish legislation, traditions and views, mainly through care and education.

Holy war against the aberration and the newspaper terrorism

Heligt krig mot förvillelsen och tidningsterrorismen

This paper explores Bernhard von Beskow’s (1796-1868) conservative critique of the, for the early 19^th century, new dominating voice in public matters namely the liberal press. There are competing narratives about the emerging liberal press and its critics. On the one hand the conservative critics were seen as hopeless reactionaries which acted against freedom of the press, themselves stripped of positive ideals and/or handled with little interest as footnotes in the great story of the liberal victory over its opponents. On the other hand this story has been questioned and an alternative has been presented of how to understand the conservatives and their critique of the press. This other story suggests that the critique was merely a critique of the new type of biased publicists that the liberal press brought about. The older form of newspapers, supposedly defended by the conservatives, were more of organs for the readers and their conversations amongst each other. The readers would send in whatever they had to say and the editor’s duty was to print it. The new type of newspapers, however, spoke in its own name for the people, it wasn’t longer a conversation from person to person. This paper doesn’t fully agree with any of the stories. Instead the paper shows how the conservative von Beskow had positive ideals, that he wasn’t against the freedom of the press as such, and that the conservative strain in von Beskow’s critique was not his will to preserve an older type of press. It was instead his opinion that the liberal press had an abstract understanding of politics and therefore wasn’t rooted in concrete political work, making it nonsense. Therefore the critique was mainly directed against a new and potentially destructive force of the political life of Sweden.

To shed light on a number of paradoxes in Hobbes’s theory, I use a series of concepts culled from the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995). Deleuze distinguishes two different ways of doing philosophy: One is the dominant mode in Western tradition, which Deleuze names "State Philosophy", which emphasises identity and universals and serves to confirm and justify the powers that be. Deleuze’s alternative way of doing philosophy emphasises difference rather than unity and sameness. Deleuze labels this kind of philosophy nomad thought. Hobbes is torn between these two ways of thinking, but tends overall towards a State Philosophy.

To show exactly how these forces clash in Hobbes’s philosophy I compare Hobbes to the Aristotelian methodologist Jacopo Zabarella (1533-1589). Zabarella develops a method of proving a fact by moving from knowledge of the mere fact to an understanding of the fact through its cause. Hobbes uses a similar method, especially in the argument from the condition of nature.

There is an ambiguity in Hobbes’s concept of truth, however, between his explicit coherence theory and implicit correspondence theory of truth. To explain this paradox I avail myself of Michel Foucault’s theory of the episteme of the Classical age in The Order of Things. This implicit conception of a given order (or "virtual ontology") is what structures Hobbes’s philosophy and makes knowing possible. Within the bounds of this order both a conventionalist and a realist stance are possible.

All concepts, being constituted through experience, are particular and subjective, which raises the question of how Hobbes explains the creation of universal names. The Aristotelian answer, that the active intellect discerns the universal in the particular, is not compatible with Hobbes’s strictly materialist and nominalist metaphysics. Hobbes’s implicit presupposition is that reality is structured so that similar things cause similar impressions on all observers given the same conditions.

Hobbes describes man as prey to many and shifting passions. Still, he makes it clear that it is the duty of every man to order his or her passions as to have one constant and rational will. The urge towards self-preservation serves to constitute the unified self, specifically a male self.

In Hobbes’s view, religion arises out of human imagination and the emotions of hope and fear. At the same time Hobbes’s God is above all a lawgiver and the guarantor of morals. It is because the laws of nature are divine laws that they are unconditionally binding. All of Hobbes’s philosophy is actually concerned with creating molar individuals that are capable of making and keeping promises.

On every account, from metaphysics over epistemology and the theory of the mind to ethics, theology and political philosophy, Hobbes simultaneously evinces traits of a nomad philosopher as well as a State philosopher, but the tendency towards State philosophy tends to get the upper hand, even though the tension always remains. Understanding this tension also sheds a new light upon many of the paradoxes of Hobbes’s philosophy.