“Incisive, Dissonant” Rationality vs. Aesthetic Modernism: Hedenius and Trotzig

Ulf Olsson

doi:10.3390/h9030103

Abstract

The Swedish “Welfare State” of the 1950s was described as a rational, well-organized society by leading Swedish philosopher, Professor Ingemar Hedenius. His biopolitical vision emphasized the scientific basis for social reforms, and he was an active opponent to any kind of religious thinking. Hedenius also worked as a literary critic, and he would use that role to confront literary representations of contemporary society that did not fit in with his promulgation of rationality. Hedenius furiously attacked Swedish writer Birgitta Trotzig’s A Landscape (1959). In her book, she challenges any harmonizing vision of society. She does it through representations of the body, and the gaze that does not shy away from the anguished and pained body, the body opening up and giving birth. The body in Trotzig’s work is also the tortured body of Christ. With the Swedish welfare state as a point of reference, this article explores the collision between what can be called a “rational modernism” and aesthetic modernism: Hedenius called Trotzig’s book “evil,” and Trotzig, when she commented upon this almost three decades later, saw Hedenius’s review as an authoritarian assault.

Highlights

The Swedish “Welfare State” of the 1950s was described as a rational, well-organized society by leading Swedish philosopher, Professor Ingemar Hedenius
The homes were all tidy and shining; this was a “happy and well-organized society.”1 Or as Lena Lennerhed summarized the era: “During the 1950s, women could take courses on femininity.”2 It was, in other words, an art to be a woman, which is the title of Lennerhed’s chapter about the fifties in her work on the politics surrounding the question of abortion in Sweden. There she sums up several historical studies of the fifties in terms of women’s feelings of discomfort, uneasiness, fatigue, and dissatisfaction in the welfare state of the 1950s. This was an era when politics tended to be an outspoken biopolitics, a politics directed towards the condition of the population at large3 —Sweden had, for instance, in 1955 as the first country ever, introduced obligatory sex education in schools (Lennerhed 2002, p. 141)
Hedenius reviewed Ett landskap in the most important daily paper in Sweden, Dagens Nyheter, and he recognized in Trotzig someone who put the basic rationality of the welfare state at risk

Summary

Introduction

The Swedish “Welfare State” of the 1950s was described as a rational, well-organized society by leading Swedish philosopher, Professor Ingemar Hedenius. One can understand Hedenius’s emphasis on rationality as a philosophical counterpart to the art of social engineering, so important in the transition of the “people’s home” to the welfare state.6 Johan

Results

Conclusion