Problematical Parents and Critical Children: What Is the Significance of Gunnar and Alva Myrdal's Chequered Family History?

How can one judge the policies of Alva Myrdal in the Thirties? Alva Myrdal, one of Sweden's best-known feminists, suggested sterilisation in her proposed family policy during that decade. In the internationally reported intensive Swedish debate in the autumn of 1997 on the Swedish forced sterilisation 1935–1975, Alva Myrdal's ideas played a major role. What picture of Alva Myrdal evolves out of that debate, and how does it stand in relationship to her own writings and the general discursive context of the Thirties? Chronocentrism is discussed.

Purpose Theoretical reconstruction for the sake of practical political relevance is inherently resistant to the theorisation of a rigorous sociological discipline. Yet, the need for such theoretical reconstruction recurs in history, particularly in times of social and economic crisis when social reconstruction of damaged, fractured and conflict-ridden societies was seen as urgent by both applied sociologists and publics at large. Methodology/approach This paper directs itself to questions regarding the intellectual and political origins of the Swedish, egalitarian, democratic welfare state ideology in the 1930s, and how it came to be theoretically defined in opposition to the overarching binary frameworks of ‘conservative’ capitalism and ‘progressive’ Marxist socialism. Findings Using McLennan’s notion of a ‘vehicular’ concept, I will attempt to show that the ‘third’ or ‘middle way’ compromise between opposing interests has, since its inception in the earlier parts of the twentieth century, changed over time, and will continue to change, within shifting political contexts and changing practical, political demands to ‘move things on’. Practical implications This paper also examines the concept of social planning – social engineering – as a ‘third way’ practical strategy and how it came to be used as a political and theoretical stick by which attack ‘third way’ democracy by both neo-liberal and Marxist theorists. Originality/value The paper builds on the author’s previous research on the intellectual and political visions of the Swedish social scientists and reformers, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, and argues for the continuing importance of theoretical reconstruction and innovation in the preservation of justice and democracy.

This paper addresses issues in the use of biographical materials in writing about the contribution about Alva and Gunnar Myrdal to the history of sociology and of research methods. After presenting a brief summary about the Myrdals' sociological research works and the biographical material available about them, the paper discusses a series of methodological dilemmas facing the biographical researcher, dilemmas identified by methodologists writing at the time of the Myrdals' own major period of sociologically informed research during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, and by more recent debates in history on the impact of postmodernist approaches to evidence. The paper argues that the use of biographical material as evidence in intellectual history, and elsewhere, needs to be guided by the same principles of the search for validity and representativeness as in other areas of social research, even though the frameworks of relevance chosen in the process of interpretation may be set by contemporary concerns.

I am honored to accept this award named for Henry Knowles Beecher, whose courageous research helped to launch bioethics, and especially to receive it from The Hastings Center. I remember my sense of discovery and elation on taking part in one of the Center's first meetings, in 1971, and realizing that here was a group of people from many fields working on practical moral problems that I cared about deeply, yet had never had a chance to debate in so broad-gauged and stimulating a context. Daniel Callahan has asked me to speak about my studies and my work in theoretical and practical ethics; and in bioethics, which has been central to that work from the outset. Not only do all questions of moral choice that human beings face arise in the context of medicine, they do so with special urgency. Medicine provides a magnifying mirror held up to human interaction in all its complexity. When people are helped or hurt by medical care or through research, dealt with fairly by health professionals or exploited, lied to or told the truth, this often matters to them more than at times when they have less at stake and are less vulnerable. As a seventeen-year-old, I had no thought of addressing such issues when, in 1953, I was preparing to enter the Sorbonne University in Paris. I was auditing courses in Sanskrit, literature, and philosophy, and hoping to study toward a degree in philosophy. Mlle. Jeanne Hersch, a brilliant teacher at the International School in Geneva, from which I had just graduated, had made this field come alive for me; while she taught textual analysis and French composition with passion and utmost rigor, she was also translating books by her teacher Karl jaspers into French. I was struck by one of these books--an introduction to philosophy that had originated as a set of radio lectures for the general public.[1] It seemed to speak directly to my questions about how to begin studies in this field. In an appendix to his book, jaspers offers luminously annotated reading lists for students aiming to immerse themselves in a systematic study of philosophy. Such a study, he suggests, must include efforts to move along three paths: participation in scientific research, broadly viewed as rooted in both the physical and the moral sciences; study of the great philosophers in the Occidental, Indian, and Chinese traditions; and serious attention to questions of conscience in daily life, beginning with How shall I live? But students would leave out something essential, jaspers adds, if they did not also allow themselves to be seized by the high works of religion, poetry, and art. What matters is not to read always for the greatest possible variety, but to attach oneself to what is great and to plunge back into it constantly A few rare works of philosophy [such as those of Plato and Kant] contain thought as infinite as the great masterworks of art. /.../ One single great thinker suffices to allow us to attain the entire domain of philosophy. In penetrating deeply into the work of a lifetime, one finds oneself at a center that illuminates all the rest and toward which the light flows back. (pp. 229, 231) Such an approach to the study of philosophy, at once inclusive and focused, seemed as persuasive to me then as it does today. But when I broached my plans to my mother, she was not convinced that I was making the right choice, nor was my father. My parents, Alva Myrdal and Gunnar Myrdal, both of whom had devoted themselves, at different times in their lives, to scholarship, public service, politics, and writing, pointed out that my proposed course of study might prepare me poorly for putting my education to creative practical use. Why, they asked, should I not rather take up anthropology, following in the path of Margaret Mead and others whom they knew? Or, as my father had long hoped, his own field of economics? …

As two of the leading social scientists of the twentieth century, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal tried to establish a harmonious, “organic” Gemeinschaft [community] in order to fight an assumed disintegration of modern society. By means of functionalist architecture and by educating “sensible” citizens, disciplining bodies, and reorganizing social relationships they attempted to intervene in the lives of ordinary men. The paradox of this task was to modernize society in order to defend it against an “ambivalent modernity.” This combination of Weltanschauung [world view], social science, and technical devices became known as social engineering. The Myrdals started in the early 1930s with Sweden, and then chose the world as their working field. In 1938, Gunnar Myrdal was asked to solve the “negro problem” in the United States, and, in the 1970s, Alva Myrdal campaigned for the world's super powers to abolish all of their nuclear weapons. The Myrdals successfully established their own "modern American" marriage as a media image and role model for reform. Far from perfect, their marriage was disrupted by numerous conflicts, mirrored in thousands of private letters. This marital conflict propelled their urge for social reform by exposing the need for the elimination of irrational conflicts from everyday life. A just society, according to the Myrdals, would merge social expertise with everyday life, and ordinary men with the intellectually elite. Thomas Etzemüller's study of these two figures brings to light the roots of modern social engineering, providing insight for today's sociologists, historians, and political scholars.

bility of marriage. The intensity and direction of this influence are not, however, easily determined. Two conflicting influences are: (1) families with children enjoy some social benefits which must be assumed to have obviated fatal marriage discord resulting from economic difficulties entailed in the support of many children; and (2) through its social welfare program, society has taken over many of the functions formerly belonging to the family and has thereby diminished the common responsibility of husband and wife toward the family, thus facilitating and clearing the way for divorces. Such a development is not necessarily in conflict with a policy focused mainly on the physical and psychic health of the child. During the last two decades social legislation in Sweden has been to a large degree dictated by the changing population developments. The rapid decrease of the birth rate during the twenties attracted attention, was widely discussed following a study made by Alva and Gunnar Myrdal in 1934, and finally was an item on the agenda of the Riksdag. Parliamentary committees submitted legislative proposals which purposed to decrease the economic burden caused by children and to increase the security of children. Thus the law did not aim simply at a higher birth rate irrespective of the social environment in which the child would grow up. It was also concerned with the child's physical and psychic well-being. This is evident, for example, in the sterilization law of 1941 and in the abortion law of 1946.

Gunnar and Alva Myrdal: Social Science as Social Engineering

Contents: Preface Introduction - setting the scene: some preliminary remarks on migration and transfer, Cherry Schrecker Part I Reception and National Sociologies: The transatlantic origin of the modern reception of Max Weber's work in the 1960s, Ute Gerhardt Talcott Parsons and the transatlantic voyages of Weberian and Durkheimian theories, Victor Lidz Transatlantic voyages and national sociologies, Jennifer Platt Research trips to the United States in the 1950s: from their beginnings to the redefinition of French sociology, Patricia Vannier The Techniques of the Body by Marcel Mauss: American culture, everyday life and French theory, Jean-Marc Leveratto The origins of medical sociology, Catherine Dechamp-Le Roux Community and community studies: a return journey, Cherry Schrecker. Part II Cultural and Academic Visits: Herbert Spencer' dangerous pilgrimage: in America, 1882, David Chalcraft Lester F. Ward and world sociology, James J. Chriss Ellwood's Europe, Stephen P. Turner From the methodological note to the method of sociology: Florian Znaniecki's role in the methodological debate in interwar American sociology, Elzbieta Halas Social research for social decency: Gunnar and Alva Myrdal and the Chicago school of sociology, E. Stina Lyon. Part III Exile and Reconstruction: A collective biography (prosopography) of German-speaking sociologists, Christian Fleck Alfred Schutz's influence on American sociology during his lifetime, George Psathas Hidden impacts of a cultural migration: traces of Lewis Coser's transatlantic experiences in his sociological work, Fiewel Kupferberg Everett C. Hughes' journey in occupied Germany (1948): black market, bastard institutions and dirty work, Suzie Guth Nels Anderson in Germany: from interim assignment to long-term involvement, Alexia Arnold Index.

Compulsory sterilisation was one of the most provocative aspects of the history of Swedish Social Policy. Much has been written about the topic from a social discourse perspective, while the economic discourse of compulsory sterilisation has not been fully recognised. This paper suggests that one needs to use an economic discourse to fully understand some aspects of compulsory sterilisation in the Swedish welfare state discourse between the 1910s and the late 1940s. This paper is based on a discourse analysis: by using metaphors it analyses how pragmatic economic considerations played an important role in creating public support for compulsory sterilisation. This paper suggests that economic motives became the dominant factor in the social democratic eugenic discourse over time and thereby replaced the racial and conservative elements of the dominant Swedish eugenic discourse. The network around Herman Lundborg, director of the Government Institute for Race Biology, changed the focus on costs as an important motive for compulsory sterilisation which was also used by the social democratic scholars Gunnar and Alva Myrdal. The paper indicates that using economic metaphors could create a more diverse understanding of the Swedish welfare state that had other motives than just social ones.

Ethics and the Social Sciences. Edited by Leo R. Ward. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 1959. Pp. xi, 127. $3.25.) - Value In Social Theory. Essays by Gunnar Myrdal, selected and edited by Paul Streeten. (New York: Harper & Brothers. 1959. Pp. xlvi, 269. $5.00.) - Volume 54 Issue 2

No view without a viewpoint: Gunnar Myrdal

Counter Space: Design and Modern . Museum of Modern Art, New York. 15 September 2010–2 May 2011 Drawn from Museum of Modern Art's holdings in design, art, and film, Counter Space highlights 1926–27 Frankfurt designed for large public housing projects of that German city. While curator Juliet Kinchin and curatorial assistant Aidan O'Connor claim in wall text to explore the twentieth-century transformation of kitchen as a barometer of changing technologies, aesthetics, and ideologies, exhibit offers surprisingly little political analysis of gender stereotypes and domestic workplace. It recapitulates dominant ideas about woman's proper place—at home working in efficient private kitchen—without context of feminist critiques and collective alternatives created over last century and a half. curators emphasize design and technology in a crowded exhibit divided into four parts: Toward Modern Kitchen, The New Kitchen, Visions of Plenty, and Kitchen Sink Dramas. Kitchen design was subject of intense controversy in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as part of debates about how public and private life would be defined in an urban, industrial society. For example, Melusina Fay Peirce's Cambridge Cooperative Housekeeping Society, Ellen Swallow Richards's New England and Alva Myrdal and Sven Markelius's Collective House in Stockholm provided alternative visions of kitchen as collective infrastructure to support women's full involvement in paid employment and public life. Peirce and her collaborators worked together to provide cooked food and clean laundry to husbands for cash on delivery in 1869; Richards taught at MIT and designed large-scale equipment for community kitchens staffed by women scientists within neighborhoods or settlement houses in 1890; Myrdal and Markelius built an apartment house with …

This paper directs itself to the impact of American social science on the writings of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal on the role of education and social science in “modern” industrial democracy. After a brief sketch of the Myrdals' role in the development of Swedish welfare reforms and of their intellectual contacts in the United States during the 1930's, the paper outlines four theoretical “dilemmas” of “modernity” to the solution of which education and social research was seen to contribute: the relationships between facts and values, the individual and the collective, child rearing and social change, and theory and practice. The paper concludes by tracing the articulation of these themes in the Social Democratic Party school reform proposals of 1948.

Of all the social science theories that have been applied to school desegregation policy, none has a longer or more important history than the harm and benefit thesis. In its simplest form, the thesis holds that school segregation is harmful to the social, psychological, and educational development of children, both minority and white, and that school desegregation is beneficial for undoing or at least ameliorating the damages from segregation and discrimination. While the harm and benefit thesis began as a purely social science theory, its apparent endorsement by the Supreme Court in Brown gave the thesis an enormous boost, elevating it from academic theory to moral authority. From Brown to the present time, the harm and benefit thesis has played a curious and bifurcated role in the evolution of school desegregation policy. Although it began as a social science theory that had apparently found its way into judicial doctrine, its role in the courts soon parted from its role among educators, social scientists, and civil rights groups. On the judicial front, a number of lower court decisions in the early 1970s stressed the harms of school segregation and the benefits of integration remedies. The Supreme Court itself never again explicitly addressed the harm and benefit thesis after Brown, however, and its judicial relevance diminished over the next three decades as the high Court majority restricted the application of Brown to government-enforced school segregation. For this reason many constitutional scholars have long maintained that the psychological harm finding in Brown is not an essential part of constitutional law. To the extent that a harm thesis can be inferred from current judicial doctrine, then, harm arises only if school (or other) segregation is sanctioned by law or official action. For many other actors on the desegregation stage, however, the harm and benefit thesis has had a far broader applicability. During the periods when the earliest formulations began to appear, such as that by Gunnar Myrdal in 1944 or the famous doll studies of Kenneth and Mamie Clark in the late 1930s, most existing segregation was in fact sanctioned by law, and thus most social science research on this issue of necessity reflected the effects of official segregation.

Identification of the private life concept scopes within the civil law is of significance from both, theoretical and practical point of view. Private life is subject of research of various disciplines. Regarding the goals of this work, it is of interest to identify the degree of reflecting of the social requirements related to private life in the norms of private law and what aspects of private life are protected in legal provisions. Significance of this issue is particularly conditioned by correlation between private and personal life. To clarify the above it would be reasonable to identify the substance of public life, as well as the limits of public and private spheres. Georgian legislation does not distinguish private and personal life; neither provides it the definitions of these concepts. Georgian Civil Code (hereinafter referred to as CCG) provides the provisions on protection of human dignity, business reputation, personal life secrecy, images and in 2008 the provision on personal data was added, as these comprise one of the parts of private life. Goal of the research is identification of the spheres (aspects) of private life protected by the legislation. In addition, the scopes of private life protected by the legislation should be identified, as conditioned by social, cultural, technical and other conditions in the society. Aspects of private life spheres should be classified by certain signs. This work is the attempt to study, together with Georgian legislation and judicial practice, as well as overview European judicial practice, to identify the ways for elimination of gaps. Research showed that there is correlation between social and legal bases of private life, similar to the private and public spheres, In addition, in many cases the private and public spheres are so close that sometimes there is no limit between them at all. It should be noted that public life, with its substance, in some context, may be equal to the public life, though public sphere is the sphere related to implementation of the governmental and non-governmental (public) function. Personal life, on its side, is the part of private sphere, which is closely related to a person directly and deals with body and moral integrity, ensures person's autonomy, develops individuality, what can be created by birth, as well as by the law. This, private and personal spheres are concepts Mostly, elements of private (personal) sphere are not legally protected; they are regulated by the moral norms. With respect of legal technique of protection, the decisive role is added to general personal right. Researches showed that Georgian legislation includes some elements of general personal right and recognition of general personal right is the way to protection of the private (personal) life and it has practical sense as well correlated as general and specific, as there are type and form correlation between them. Consequently, if personal rights are not protected in all aspects, general personal right should be recognized.