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The Social Origins of Liberal Democracy: The Swedish Case*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Timothy A. Tilton
Timothy A. Tilton*
Affiliation:
Indiana University
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Abstract

Implicit in Dahrendorf's Society and Democracy in Germany and explicit in Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy are respectively a liberal and a radical model of democratic development. Neither of these models adequately accounts for the experience of Sweden, a remarkably successful “late developer.” Although Swedish industrialization proceeded with little public ownership of the means of production, with limited welfare programs until the 1930s, and above all with restricted military expenditure—all factors Dahrendorf implies are crucial for democratic development—it did not produce the traditional liberal infrastructure of bourgeois entrepreneurs nor a vigorous open market society. Similarly only three of Moore's five preconditions for democracy obtained in Sweden: a balance between monarchy and aristocracy, the weakening of the landed aristocracy, and the prevention of an aristocratic-bourgeois coalition against the workers and peasants. There was no thorough shift toward commercial agriculture and, most important, there was no revolutionary break with the past. Consequently, one has to evolve a radical liberal model of development which states the conditions for the emergence of democracy in Sweden without revolution. This model contains implications for the further modernization of American politics.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 68 , Issue 2 , June 1974 , pp. 561 - 571
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1974

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Footnotes

*

I am extremely grateful to Barrington Moore, Jr., David Olson, and Lennart Lundqvist for their extensive and extremely helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

References

1 Dahrendorf, Ralf, Society and Democracy in Germany (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), esp. chapters 3 and 4Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., p. 44.

3 Ibid., p. 52.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid., p. 38.

6 Ibid., p. 42.

7 Moore, Barrington Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), esp. chapter VIIGoogle Scholar.

8 Ibid., pp. 430–431.

9 Ibid., p. 426.

10 Roberts, Michael, Essays in Swedish History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967), p. 2 Google Scholar.

11 Verney, Douglas, Parliamentary Reform in Sweden, 1866–1921 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 91 Google Scholar.

12 Ibid., p. 89.

13 Verney, pp. 248–249.

14 Rustow, Dankwart, “Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Theory,” Comparative Politics, 2 (04, 1970), 337–63, at p. 356 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Samuelsson, Kurt, From Great Power to Welfare State (London: Allen & Unwin, 1968), pp. 146, 186 Google Scholar.

16 Ander, O. Fritiof, The Building of Modern Sweden (Rock Island, Ill.: Augustana Library Publications, 1958), p. 51 Google Scholar.

17 Samuelsson, , From Great Power to Welfare State, p. 189 Google Scholar; Ander, p. 51.

18 Samuelsson, p. 199.

19 Ander, p. 51.

20 Cole, Margaret and Smith, Charles, eds., Democratic Sweden (London: Routledge, 1938), p. 128 Google Scholar.

21 Ibid., p. 129.

22 Ryden, Bengt, “The Swedish Economy,” in Sweden in the Sixties, ed. Wizelius, Ingemarr (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1967), pp. 117–118 Google Scholar.

23 Erik Dahmen, cited in Samuelsson, , From Great Power to Welfare State, p. 200 Google Scholar.

24 Dahmen, p. 164.

25 Ibid.

26 Adler-Karlsson, Gunnar, Functional Socialism (Stockholm: Prisma, 1969), p. 18 Google Scholar.

27 Oakley, Stewart, The Story of Sweden (London: Faber, 1966), p. 39 Google Scholar; cf. Anderson, Ingvar, A History of Sweden (New York: Praeger, 1956), p. 43 Google Scholar.

28 Dahl, Robert, Polyarchy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), pp. 105 ff.Google Scholar, stresses the significance of this point for “polyarchical” development. This important book by a prominent “liberal” would qualify as a leading representative of the liberal school of development theory, but it does not concentrate upon “late” modernization, nor does Dahl ever come fully to grips with Moore's emphasis upon the therapeutic role of violence in democratic development. Dahl's list of “conditions favoring polyarchy” is so extensive and so heterogeneous that doing his theory justice would require a separate article. Furthermore, Dahl's seems to be a theory of a different type from Dahrendorf's and Moore's, one concerned not only with the genesis of democracy, but also with its functional requisites.

29 Stomberg, Andrew, A History of Sweden (New York: Macmillan, 1931), p. 206 Google Scholar.

30 Roberts, , Essays in Swedish History, p. 119 Google Scholar.

31 Andersson, , A History of Sweden, p. 216 Google Scholar.

32 Roberts, p. 25.

33 Moore, , Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, p. 422 Google Scholar.

34 Ander, , The Building of Modern Sweden, p. 46 Google Scholar.

35 Samuelsson, , From Great Power to Welfare State, pp. 148–149 Google Scholar.

36 Tham, Wilhelm, “Industrialization of Sweden's Rural Areas,” Scandinavia Past and Present (Odense: Arnkrone, 1959), p. 800 Google Scholar.

37 Cited in Koblik, Steven, “Wartime Diplomacy and the Democratization of Sweden in September-October 1917,” Journal of Modern History, 41 (03, 1969), 29 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The non-partisan, but highly conservative Hammerskjold cabinet earned the nickname “Hungerskjold” cabinet because of its failures in supplying food to working-class Swedes.

38 From the diary of Social Democratic Cabinet Minister Värner Rydén. Gerdner, Gunnar “Ministären Edén och författningsrevisionen” in Kring demokratins genombrott i Sverige, ed. Hadenius, Stig (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 1966), pp. 105 ffGoogle Scholar.

39 Brusewitz, Alex, Kungamakt, Herremakt, Folkmakt (Stockholm: Tidens förlag, 1951), pp. 109–112 Google Scholar.

40 Söderpalm, Sven Anders, Storföretagarna och det demokratiska genombrottet (Lund: Gleerup, 1969), pp. 189, 208, 216 Google Scholar; Gerdner, Gunnar, “Ministären Edén och författningsrevisionen,” pp. 110, 113 Google Scholar.

41 “National unity, legality, liberalism, and complex constitutional government thus facilitated Sweden's political transformation. They are not, however, enough to explain it—precisely because they were traditions that had been in effect long before the transition to democracy began. They are best put in the category of background conditions that came into play once the process of change was set off by other stimuli.” Rustow, Dankwart, “Sweden's Transition to Democracy: Some Notes toward a Genetic Theory,” Scandinavian Political Studies VI (1971), 15 Google Scholar.

42 The reformist orientation of the Social Democratic left was clearly a further condition of liberal democratic development in Sweden. This important matter of Social Democratic attitudes is taken largely as a “given” here, partly because analyzing the origin of this “moderation” would go well beyond the limits of this paper, and partly because Herbert Tingsten has thoroughly documented the evolution of the Social Democratic platform in his detailed two-volume study, Den svenska socialdemokratiens idéutveckling (Stockholm: Aldus/Bonnier, 1967)Google Scholar. A more recent and somewhat revisionist account is Lewin, Leif, Planhushållnings debatten (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1967)Google Scholar.

43 For a similar phenomenon in Norway see Nilson, Sten, “Wahlsoziologische Probleme des Nationalsozialismus,” Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft, 110 (1954), 279–311 Google Scholar.

44 Alexander Gerschenkron has pointed to a similar kind of substitution in his writings on economic backwardness. Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1966), esp. ch. 1Google Scholar. All industrializing societies must acquire a surplus sufficient for investment in industrial capital, but the generation of this surplus can assume quite different forms. The development of a banking system like the German one may substitute new processes for the cruder forms of “primitive accumulation”; similarly foreign investment or forced appropriation by the state may “substitute” as methods of acquiring investment capital. In political development, too, “substitutes” may be found for “preconditions,” or to employ more accurate language, there are certain obstacles that must be overcome if democratic and liberal tendencies are to emerge, but these obstacles may be overcome in a variety of ways. Unfortunately the language of necessary “preconditions” and “prerequisites” has tended to obscure the empirical importance and the logical validity of “substitution.”

45 This analysis obviously owes debts to and complements the work of Robert Dahl, Albert Hirschman, and Joseph Hamburger. Dahl's “Axiom 5” (Polyarchy, p. 49) might be rephrased for present purposes as “The likelihood that a government will tolerate radical reform increases with a reduction in the capacity of the government to use violence or socioeconomic sanctions to suppress an opposition.” Dahl quite properly concentrates on the relationship between government and opposition rather than the absolute size and strength of the government.

My colleague David Collier called my attention to Hirschman's precise logical analysis of “reformmongering” ( Journeys Toward Progress, Garden City, 1965, esp. pp. 360 ff.Google Scholar) after my analysis of Swedish development was well-advanced. Hirschman's schematic analysis of “engineering reform with the help of the perspective of revolution” parallels remarkably the Swedish situation in the closing years of World War I.

Comparisons between the English Reform Acts and Sweden's evolutionary transition to democracy are natural and instructive, particularly so when one consults Hamburger's, James Mill and the Art of Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963)Google Scholar. Hamburger goes well beyond a recital of Mill's activity to a careful statement of the conditions and tactics for the achievement of fundamental reforms without violence. Hamburger stresses the importance of the army's strength and reliability, the government's self-confidence or “nerve,” and the reformers' organization and leadership.

All of these works, but particularly the latter two, illustrate the often-neglected point that liberal democratic development entails policy choices; it does not follow automatically upon the fulfillment of certain “socio-economic preconditions.”

46 Dahrendorf, , Society and Democracy in Germany, p. 15 Google Scholar.

47 Moore, , Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, p. 431 Google Scholar.