The Social Scientific Gaze: The Social Question and the Rise of Academic Social Science in Sweden

Description

The social sciences have, ever since they were first established as academic disciplines, played a foundational role in most spheres of modern society – in policy-making, education, the media and public debate – and hence also, indirectly, for our self-understanding as social beings.

The Social Scientific Gaze examines the discursive formation of academic social science in the historical context of the ‘social question’, that is, the protracted and wide-ranging discussions on the social problems of modernity that were being debated with increased intensity during the nineteenth century. Empirically, the study focuses on the Lor