Abstract
Despite its focus on a short-lived and long-forgotten foundation in Sweden—the Lorén Foundation— The Social Scientific Gaze: The Social Question and the Rise of Academic Social Science in Sweden is a timely and important book in more ways than one. Set in the late nineteenth century, the tentacles of the issues Per Wisselgren addresses are long enough to still reach us and strong enough to still ensnare us.
I was in Sweden while reading the book and had a few inadvertent encounters with some of the characters the book introduces us to. One was with the still-famous playwright August Strindberg (1849–1912), who appears in the margins of the book as a member of the social networks that Wisselgren describes. I watched a film based on his emotionally excruciating play, Miss Julie, where servants meet their masters, where ambition and aspiration both challenge and are thwarted by tradition, where vulnerability is ravished by cunning, and where love as a social leveler is dangled as a promise only to get cruelly crushed in the end. I also encountered Strindberg at a museum, Sven-Harry’s Art Museum, where one of his dark and gloomy paintings is on prominent display.
More surprising was my encounter with Ellen Key (1845–1929), a writer, educator, and feminist who once served on the board of the Lorén Foundation but is now largely forgotten. I had my encounter with her at an exhibit devoted to ugly things, where a quote attributed to her adorned a wall: “It is harmful for nerves as well as eyes to meet the ugly, the messy, and the meaningless.” What these encounters point to is not only the continued relevance of what Wisselgren calls the “social question,” an umbrella term for the abundant social ills that inspired commentary and debate in the late nineteenth century, but also the entanglement of art/story-telling and science/fact-gathering in the rise of social science.
The “social question,” according to Wisselgren, encompasses a whole series of questions that attracted public attention and intervention from the 1830s on, among them the “worker’s question, the poor relief question, the ‘stomach question’, the education question, the housing question, the women’s question, the home ownership question, the population question, the suffrage question and the emigration question” (p. 5). More important to us sociologists, beyond the reminder that many of the social ills we still investigate remain unanswered and politically unresolved, is Wisselgren’s analysis of how the pursuit of the social question, in Sweden and elsewhere, was a key ingredient in the development of academic social science as we know it today.
In the story he tells, however, it is not the substance of the social question that stands out as much as the social scientific gaze that provides it with aim, meaning, and direction. Originating in the educated urban middle class, the social scientific gaze traveled on trains, in classrooms, in lectures and publications, on the shelves of libraries, in magazines and newspapers, at dinner parties and other social gatherings, and, not least, in the research endeavors promoted and funded by the Lorén Foundation. Wisselgren brings to life a buzzling intellectual and political era that is filled with disdain for tradition and a growing concern and distaste for inequality and poverty, but also the promise of amelioration with the help of a new social science. Using analytical tools developed by Foucault, Latour, and others, he demonstrates how, in the midst of this new social space, a specific way of seeing and observing the social world took shape. This is the social scientific gaze. Far from neutral and objective, it simultaneously generates a particular form of knowledge production and fosters a particular social relation “between the observing middle-class and the observed working-class” (p. 12).
But academic disciplines are not only about knowledge production, of course, but also about institutions. And this is where the Lorén Foundation emerges as an important player. When young Victor Lorén (1857–1885), the hero of the story, took his own life at the age of 27, after a protracted struggle with consumption, he left his fortune to the promotion of the social sciences in Sweden. It was during his studies and travels abroad that Lorén had encountered new ways of thinking about social life and the problems and hardships that accompanied industrialization. It was a way of thinking that had not yet found a firm footing in a Sweden that at the time was still largely a rural and intellectual backwater compared to continental Europe. The fact that the Foundation operated outside the traditional university structure gave it opportunities to fund research endeavors pursued by intellectuals and social thinkers that as yet had no stable academic homes.
Moreover, the Board, whose initial members were personally chosen by Lorén, had wide latitude when it came to dispersing the funds. Although the money lasted only about 15 years, Wisselgren argues that the Foundation’s influence nonetheless reached far into the future. By the end of its run, not only had several of the people supported by the Foundation secured leading university posts in newly established social science fields, but the social scientific gaze that the Foundation and its board members actively fostered had also come to penetrate both academic and political life.
Wisselgren does not claim that the development of the social sciences in Sweden was significantly different from that of other nations, and he spends some time comparing the Lorén Foundation with some of its larger and more well-known siblings in other nations, especially the Fabian Society in England and the Verein für Socialpolitik (now the German Economic Association) in Germany. He does claim, however, that the particular context in Sweden, where “the institutional distance between the government, the academic world and the civic sphere was shorter” than elsewhere, produced a somewhat unique development of the social sciences (p. 225). While born in the social reform movements of the late nineteenth century, the scientific pursuit of the social question and subsequent institutionalization of the social sciences also meant that the radical potential of challenges to the status quo that the social question prompted was domesticated and held in check by the social scientific gaze. This is what August Strindberg had in mind when in a scathing satire, Svarta Fanor (Black Banners), he painted a portrait of a group of former middle-class “rebels and dissidents,” several of whom were modeled on people associated with the Lorén Foundation, who ended up trading their ideals “for influential positions of power” in the new ruling class (p. 226).
As a study in the sociology of knowledge, this is an exemplary book. It is deeply theoretical, richly empirical, and engagingly written. But the book’s importance does not end there. In turning the social scientific gaze back onto its originators and practitioners, Wisselgren also encourages us, even if he does not do so himself, to reckon with our own scholarly endeavors and ambitions and examine how the gaze we use to understand the social world is directed by and entangled in who we are and where we come from.