Swedish history of ideas

rdf:langString Swedish history of ideas

rdf:langString The discipline Idé och lärdomshistoria, translated as History of Science and Ideas, is an important part of the humanities faculties in most Swedish universities, most notably Stockholm, Uppsala, Lund, Gothenburg, Umeå and Södertörn. It is a broad field of study that often involves cross disciplinary research between intellectual history, history of science, medicine or philosophy, conceptual history, history of education and media history. It is taught in Universities at undergraduate and graduate levels, and is also an active field of research. The annual journal Lychnos publishes the current research of the discipline. The discipline was founded in the early 20th century. It has become commonplace to distinguish between three distinct phases in 20th-century intellectual ideas: history of ideas, social history, and cultural history. These concern, respectively, the investigation of independent unit ideas, the social conditions of knowledge production, and the cultural-literary technologies and practices by which intellectual authority arises. The transition towards a quantitative social history took place during the 1960s as an attempt to broaden intellectual history, “which had lost itself in flights of idealist abstraction, underestimated the importance of material factors in shaping the human past, and ignored the plight of ordinary people.” A second transition took place in 1980s when social history was criticized for a lack of political self-reflexivity.