Why write a book about Johan Hjerpe and Enlightenment when no successful meeting ever took place between them? It is easy to give an answer.

One reason is that Enlightenment had a very strong presence in the social debate of the Gustavian period, and that many of its ideas also experienced a breakthrough as a practical reform programme, within the spheres of, for example, the administration of justice and legislation on freedom of the press. Another reason is that Hjerpe could not side-step the notions of Enlightenment however much he disliked them: they challenged him as obviously and permanently as their mentality insidiously influenced the entire lower middle-class social stratum to which he belonged. Equally ‘les philosophes’ and their kindred Swedish spirits, merchants, artisans and people in general were drawn into a gradual civilisation process which was, among other things, making people less violent and more tolerant of each other. But by the end of the eighteenth century, these people were still royalist and anti-aristocratic in a pre-modern way, and they did not realise that they were in the midst of a cumulative social change which, in time, would come to make them look old-fashioned.

So much for the brutal summary. It is, in fact, overly brutal, so I will elaborate on it a bit. For this, I must repeat a number of the statements I have already made.

With Enlightenment, a number of spiritual processes came to light with a unique clarity, processes which subsequently left their mark on development of mentalities in Sweden and its environs. The central thing which was new was the energetic aspiration of the Enlightenment philosophers to strip authorised ideological and cultural positions of their general, timeless validity. Knowledge was to be supported by experience, but experience was limited and special, and the truth therefore relative and not absolute. This was why Enlightenment philosophers chose foreign cultures as their vantage points from which to reflect upon their own. In this way, they could cultivate the self-reflexive relativism which was the basis of the tolerance notion they fought for and which aimed at the demolition of values which had until then been taken to be eternal. This relativism – sometimes an articulated doctrine, sometimes an unarticulated intellect – was a sort of basic conception for Enlightenment thinking, although ‘les philosophes’ often fell back on absolute values.