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ABSTRACT
This article tackles issues central to most academic disciplines, including scientific boundary demarcation, the battle of the faculties, the theory of science, and the conflict between nomothetic and idiographic methodologies, that is, between the two main approaches to science. It does so through discovering and rethinking a Methodenstreit in Swedish political science, an academic dispute involving Professor Rudolf Kjellén, the father of geopolitics, and his greatest rival, Professor S. J. Boëthius. Shortly after retiring from the Johan Skytte Professorship at Uppsala University, S. J. Boëthius published a great but inaccessible work on state theory and its history entitled Om statslivet (On the life of the state, 1916). The book critiques the positivistic and nomothetic (law-searching) approaches of the burgeoning social sciences, which were emancipating themselves from their father, history, and becoming independent disciplines. Boëthius critiqued the nomothetic studies of history, economics, statistics, sociology, and geopolitics for overemphasizing the significance of historical, economic, statistical, sociological, and geographical environments and structures. Thus, the exponents of these new or changing disciplines were criticized for neglecting the most important driving force of human affairs in Boëthius’s mind, namely, the power of personality and individual free will.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the two anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, ‘Deducirter Plan einer zu Berlin zu errichtenden höheren Lehranstalt, die in gehöriger Verbindung mit einer Akademie der Wissenschaften stehe’ (1807), in J. G. Fichte, Sämmtliche Werke 8, ed. Immanuel Hermann Fichte (Berlin, 1846), 97–204, at 122.
2 Rudolf Virchow, Die Gründung der Berliner Universität und der Uebergang aus dem philosophischen in das naturwissenschaftliche Zeitalter (Berlin, 1893), 15. Hegel’s influence on German science was enormous. Virchow explained that ‘theology and jurisprudence, state science and esthetics were translated into a Hegelian language and outlook; only in medicine and the natural sciences was the invasion limited to a few representatives’ (15). On Hegel, see Richard Bourke, Hegel’s World Revolutions (Princeton, 2023); Bourke, ‘Hegel and the French Revolution’, History of European Ideas 49, no. 4 (2023): 757–68.
3 Hans Larsson, ‘Det filosofiska och det naturvetenskapliga tidsskedet’ (1894), in Larsson, Studier och meditationer, 4th ed. (Lund, 1912), 94–101, at 96.
4 Larsson, ‘Det filosofiska och det naturvetenskapliga tidsskedet’, 97f. The philosopher Wilhelm Windelband’s rectorial address in Strassburg in 1894 contained a rebuttal of Virchow’s arguments without mentioning his name. Unfortunately, neither Larsson nor Boëthius seem to have been aware of Windelband’s critique of positivism and nomotheticism. See Windelband, Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft. Rede zum Antritt des Rectorats der Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universität Strassburg (Strassburg, 1894).
5 Charles Richet, Dans cent ans, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1892), 190–1; Richet, Om hundra år, trans. Inèz Wigert (Stockholm, 1893), 113; Larsson, ‘Det filosofiska och det naturvetenskapliga tidsskedet’, 98.
6 Larsson, ‘Det filosofiska och det naturvetenskapliga tidsskedet’, 99f.
7 Rudolf Kjellén cited in Ruth Kjellén-Björkquist, Rudolf Kjellén. En människa i tiden kring sekelskiftet, 2 vols. (Stockholm, 1970), vol. 1, 90.
8 On Boëthius, see Hjalmar Haralds, ‘Simon Johannes Boëthius’, Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift 27, no. 3 (1924): 183–7; Carl Hallendorff, ‘Simon Johannes Boëthius’, Fornvännen 19 (1924): 54–7; G. Jacobson, ‘Boëthius, Simon J’, Svenskt biografiskt lexikon 5 (1925): 148ff; Axel Brusewitz, ‘Från Svedelius till Kjellén. Några drag ur den Skytteanska lärostolens senare historia’, Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift 48, no. 1 (1945): 3–25, at 15–8; Barbro Lewin, Johan Skytte och de skytteanska professorerna (Stockholm, 1985), 157–166; Birgitta Odén, Forskarutbildningens förändringar 1890–1975. Historia, statskunskap, kulturgeografi, ekonomisk historia (Lund, 1991), 65, 101–5, 247–8; Elias Berg, ‘Simon Johannes Boëthius – en bortglömd statsteoretiker’, in Gunnar Falkemark, ed., Statsvetarporträtt. Svenska statsvetare under 350 år (Stockholm, 1992), 71–87; Oskar Pettersson, Politisk vetenskap och vetenskaplig politik. Studier i svensk statsvetenskap kring 1900 (Uppsala, 2003), 10, 14, 17, 41, 44, 66f, 116–8, 123, 180–91, 194, 202f.
9 Otto Hintze, ‘Der moderne Kapitalismus als historisches Individuum. Ein kritischer Bericht über Sombarts Werk’ (1929), in Hintze, Soziologie und Geschichte: Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur Soziologie, Politik und Theorie der Geschichte, 2nd ed., ed. Gerhard Oestreich (Otto Hintze, Gesammelte Abhandlungen 2, Göttingen, 1964), 374–426, at 382. Elsewhere, Hintze writes that ‘one can compare in order to find something general that underlies what is compared; and one can compare in order to grasp the individuality of one of the compared objects more clearly and to distinguish it from the other. The first is done by the sociologist, the second by the historian’. Hintze, ‘Soziologische und geschichtliche Staatsauffassung. Zu Franz Oppenheimers System der Soziologie’ (1929), in Hintze, Soziologie und Geschichte, 239–305, at 251.
10 S. J. Boëthius, ‘Om ideologisk och empirisk forskning inom statsvetenskapen’, Nordisk Universitetstidskrift 2, no. 3 (1901–1902): 215–28. My theoretical statements about state science are generally true also of social science, which state science, broadly speaking, is now known as in English. Political science is one of many state or social sciences.
11 Geopolitics is the study of the impact of geographical factors upon international politics. It is also the study of concrete states’ room for maneuver on the international stage. Geopolitics is the empirical and theoretical study of how the actions of states are contingent upon (i.e. restricted or enabled by) their unique geography (e.g. size, position, neighbors, and resources), demography (population size and composition), and economy (both national economy and international trade). The geopolitics of every state is thus unique. And demographic and economic factors may be added to the geographical ones. Geopolitics is several things. It is a science, the actions of states, discourse, and popular imaginations. Geopolitics includes very slowly changing factors such as geology and swiftly changing factors such as popular notions, e.g. about the friend and enemy relations of states.
12 S. J. Boëthius, Om statslivet (Stockholm, 1916).
13 Dario Castiglione and Iain Hampsher-Monk, eds., The History of Political Thought in National Context (Cambridge, 2001); Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 2002), esp. vol. 1, Regarding method; J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Present at the creation: With Laslett to the lost worlds’, International Journal of Public Affairs 2 (2006): 7–17; Pocock, Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge, 2009); Richard Whatmore, What is Intellectual History? (Cambridge, 2016); Pocock, ‘On the Unglobality of Contexts: Cambridge Methods and the History of Political Thought’, Global Intellectual History 4 (2019): 1–14.
14 Boëthius, ‘Om ideologisk och empirisk forskning inom statsvetenskapen’, 215f.
15 Ibid., 216.
16 Ibid., 216f.
17 Ibid., 217f. This of course negates the popular misconception that history repeats itself. On type formation, prognostication, and cyclicism, we would do well to read Lamprecht and Spengler as well as Collingwood.
18 On Jellinek, see Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge, 2002), 21, 188, 198–208, 212, 242, 250f, 322, 406, 452.
19 Georg Jellinek, Allgemeine Staatslehre (1900), 3rd ed., ed. Walter Jellinek (Berlin, 1914), 28–30.
20 While Boëthius critiqued Kjellén explicitly, mentioning his name, Kjellén critiqued Boëthius implicitly. Kjellén did incorporate some lessons from Boëthius regarding positivism critique and the power of the individual, but they were nevertheless in widely opposing academic camps.
21 The State-Scientific Journal of Politics, Statistics, and Economics established in 1897 and today referred to as Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift (The Swedish Journal of Political Science). At this point in time, politik usually referred to state theory, and the journal had published significantly fewer statistical or economic articles than political contributions.
22 Boëthius to Fahlbeck, 11. Jan 1917. Lund University Library. Fahlbeckska släktarkivet.
23 Boëthius, Om statslivet. For contemporary reviews of the book, see Erik Fahlbeck, ‘S. J. Boëthius: Om statslifvet’, Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift 19, no. 5 (1916): 322–8; Ludvig Stavenow, ‘Om statslifvet’, Svensk tidskrift 7 (1917): 302–7; Nils Forssell, ‘Om statslivet’, Historisk tidskrift 38 (1918): 31–7 [in ‘Öfversikter och granskningar’, separate pagination].
24 Feudalism, blood vengeance, and theocratic autocracy are examples of such institutions. The idea of societal stages of development was present already in the eighteenth century, for example in Edward Gibbon, and probably much earlier. Auguste Comte developed the idea in the nineteenth century. On stages of society in Edward Gibbon’s volumes on The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire for instance, see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Gibbon and the Shepherds: The Stages of Society in The Decline and Fall’, History of European Ideas 2, no. 3 (1981): 193–202.
25 Kurt Breysig, Der Stufenbau und die Gesetze der Weltgeschichte (Berlin, 1905). The second and third editions appeared in 1927 and 1950. Shortly after Karl Lamprecht’s death in 1915, Kurt Breysig told Rudolf Kjellén that he considered himself the last German human scientist searching for scientific laws. Breysig was virtually ‘the only representative at German universities of the research that asks for regularity (lagbundenhet) in historical investigation, while the individualistic conception remains in the pride of place’. Kjellén to Pontus Fahlbeck, 7 Dec. 1915. Lund University Library. Fahlbeckska släktarkivet.
It is slightly ironic that Meinecke praised Kjellén for reviving (elements of the thought of) his teacher Ranke after having criticized Karl Lamprecht (in the Lamprecht Streit), who had similar methodological and nomothetic aspirations as Kjellén. However, one can of course appreciate one part of an author’s oeuvre while tacitly disagreeing with other parts of it. One reason for Meinecke’s warm commendations of Kjellén was probably the latter’s sympathy for the causes of Wilhelmine Germany during the First World War.
26 Besides the statistical (Svedelius, Sundbärg, Fahlbeck, Wohlin), the geographical (Ratzel), the individualistic-historical (Carlyle, Boëthius), and the socioeconomic (Lamprecht, Breysig) studies of the state, Rudolf Kjellén wished to posit ‘a biopolitical study, so to speak, that seeks to explore the laws of their development’. Kjellén, Stormakterna. Konturer kring samtidens storpolitik, 2 vols. (Stockholm, 1905), vol. 1, Rent europeiska stormakter, 21–3, quotation at 23.
27 Boëthius, Om statslivet, 10f.
28 For an insightful critique of this positivistic assumption, see R. G. Collingwood, ‘Are history and science different kinds of knowledge?’ (1922), in Collingwood, Essays in the philosophy of history, ed. William Debbins (Austin, TX, 1965), 23–33, at 25. Stressing the importance of how populations perceive geographical environments, Collingwood critiques Montesquieu and natural explanations of human relations such as geopolitical thinking in The idea of history (Oxford, 1946), 78f, 200; Ladis K. D. Kristof, ‘The Origins and Evolution of Geopolitics’, The Journal of Conflict Resolution 4, no. 1 (1960): 15–51, at 42, 44.
29 Boëthius, Om statslivet, 12.
30 Ibid.
31 In his monumental work on the origins of historicism, Kjellén’s friend and admirer Friedrich Meinecke held ‘the essence of historism’ to be ‘the substitution of a process of individualising observation for a generalising view of human forces in history. This does not mean that the historical method excludes altogether any attempt to find general laws and types in human life. It has to make use of this approach and blend it with a feeling for the individual; and this sense of individuality was something new that it created’. Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook (1936), trans. J. E. Anderson, foreword by Isaiah Berlin (London, 1972), lv. Original: Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus (München, 1936). On historicism, see also Ernst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme. Erstes Buch: Das logische Problem der Geschichtsphilosophie (1922), ed. Friedrich Wilhelm Graf in collab. with Matthias Schloßberger (Ernst Troeltsch: Kritische Gesamtausgabe 16, Berlin and New York, 2008). On the need for, and the loss of, the logic of historical thinking within the human and social sciences, see Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner, eds., History in the humanities and social sciences (Cambridge, 2023).
32 Boëthius, Socialismen. Synpunkter och spörsmål (Stockholm, 1907), 72.
33 Boëthius, Om statslivet, 14 (note 1). Cf. Gustaf F. Steffen, Den materialistiska samhällsuppfattningens historia före Karl Marx (Stockholm, 1914).
34 Gustaf F. Steffen, Demokrati och maktpolitik (Stockholm, 1927), 9, 12.
35 ‘Från naturvetenskapligt håll och från teoretiska och praktiska sociologer med naturvetenskapligt grundade åskådningar hör man ofta påståendet, att samhällsforskningen måste tillämpa naturvetenskapliga metoder, om den öfver hufvud skall kunna gälla som någon vetenskap, samt att den måste uppdaga samhällslifvets naturlagar, om den öfver hufvud skall kunna anses gifva några vetenskapliga resultater [at 136]. … Och på den ståndpunkten befinna sig de flesta naturforskare och alla naivt ‘materialistiska’ samhällsforskare och sociala tänkare alltjämt [at 137].… Att tala om naturlagar på det mänskliga tanke-, samhälls- och kulturlifvets områden är … stridande mot erfarenheten. … Uti det mänskliga tanke-, samhälls- och kulturlifvet erfara vi alltid något, som vi aldrig erfara i naturen. Lagarna för de specifikt ‘mänskliga’ företeelserna vore det lika orimligt att kalla för ‘naturlagar’, som att kalla de specifikt ‘organiska’ företeelserna för ‘mekaniska .… Vi måste med samma sorgfällighet undvika mekanistiska och vitalistiska öfverdrifter och fantasterier’ [at 138]. Steffen, ‘Naturvetenskap och socialvetenskap’, Det nya Sverige 4 (1910): 132–40, at 136–8. The article is an excerpt from Steffen’s then still unpublished book on Sociologi. En allmän samhällslära, 4 parts, 2 vols. (Stockholm, 1910–1911).
36 Hans Järta, ‘Om statistik’ (1823), in Järta, Valda skrifter, ed. Hans Forssell, 2 vols. (Stockholm, 1882–1883), vol. 2, 203–28, at 211.
37 Järta, ‘Om statistik’, 213. For a more recent critique of the widespread misunderstanding and misuse of statistics in the social sciences, see Ronald L. Wasserstein and Nicole A. Lazar, ‘The ASA Statement on p-Values: Context, Process, and Purpose’, The American Statistician 70 (2016): 129–33.
38 Boëthius, Om statslivet, 14–7. Cf. Pontus Fahlbeck, Den statistiska typen eller regelbundenheten uti de menskliga företeelserna. Ett bidrag till statistikens teori (Lunds Universitets Årsskrift, Lund, 1897).
39 Montesquieu, The spirit of the laws (1748), ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge, 1989), books 14–18, 231–307. Kjellén read Montesquieu and cited him in several texts.
40 Kant wrote a physical geography. On it, see Stuart Elden, ‘Reassessing Kant’s Geography’, Journal of Historical Geography 35, no. 1 (2009): 3–25.
41 On Ratzel, see Mark Bassin, ‘Imperialism and the nation state in Friedrich Ratzel’s political geography’, Progress in Human Geography 11 (1987): 473–495; Ian Klinke, Life, earth, colony: Friedrich Ratzel’s necropolitical geography (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2023). On the emergence of so-called classical geopolitical thought, see Michael Heffernan, ‘Fin du siècle, fin du monde? On the origins of European geopolitics, 1890–1920’, in Klaus Dodds and David Atkinson, eds., Geopolitical traditions: A century of geopolitical thought (London and New York, 2000), 27–51.
42 Carl Ritter, Die Erdkunde im Verhältniß zur Natur und zur Geschichte des Menschen, oder allgemeine, vergleichende Geographie, als sichere Grundlage des Studiums und Unterrichts in physikalischen und historischen Wissenschaften (1817) (Berlin, 1822). Ritter’s Erdkunde was published in 23 volumes. He became the first professor of geography at the University of Berlin in 1820. The chair’s subjects were Erd-, Länder-, Völker- und Staatenkunde, the sciences of the earth, of countries, of peoples, and of states.
43 On the specific instance at Uppsala University of this wider debate on the nature of geography, see Carl Frängsmyr, Uppsala universitet 1852–1916, 2 vols. (Uppsala, 2010), vol. 2, 357–66.
44 Friedrich Ratzel, Anthropogeographie, zweiter Teil, Die geographische Verbreitung des Menschen (Stuttgart, 1891), v–vi.
45 Kjellén, Inledning till Sveriges geografi (Göteborg, 1900), 16.
46 Kjellén, ‘Undersökningar till politikens system’ I, Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift 21, no. 2 (1918): 98–128, at 108f. Here, Kjellén also cites, though not with complete approval, Droysen’s assertion that politics ‘ist selbst nichts anderes als die Gegenwart der Geschichte’, i.e. that politics ‘is itself nothing more than the present of history’ or contemporary history. The saying that ‘history is past politics and politics present history’ has been attributed to the British historians Edward Freeman and John Seeley.
47 Kjellén, ‘Studier öfver Sveriges politiska gränser’, Ymer 19, no. 3 (1899): 283–331, at 283.
48 Kjellén, Inledning till Sveriges geografi, 17.
49 H. T. Buckle, History of civilization in England, 2 vols. (London, 1857–1861); Boëthius, Om statslivet, 18 (note 3). For an important contemporary critique of Buckle’s positivism, see Johann Gustav Droysen, ‘Die Erhebung der Geschichte zur Rang einer Wissenschaft’ (1863), in Droysen, Historik, 7th ed. (München, 1937), 386–405. Droysen’s review of Buckle was first published in Sybel’s Historische Zeitschrift 9 (1863): 1–22; Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (New York, 2011), 312f.
50 Emil Svensén, Sverige och dess grannar (Stockholm, 1901); Svensén, Geografiska eröfringar. Ett blad ur den sociala geografien (Stockholm, 1908). In his 1901 inaugural lecture, Boëthius mentions Svensén and Ratzel (not Kjellén, though he is clearly the main target of criticism) as writers who sought to determine specific laws by which the soil influences its inhabitants and their societies. He critiques such geopolitical and environmental-deterministic tendencies for not being as empirical as they are proclaimed to be and for being ideologically charged. Boëthius, ‘Om ideologisk och empirisk forskning inom statsvetenskapen’, 219f; Boëthius, Om statslivet, 18 (note 3).
51 This belief is in contrast to my own conviction that, in order to comprehend it more fully, we need to see science as the profoundly man-made endeavor that it is. I learned this from reading the prominent historians of science Thomas Kuhn and Steven Shapin. See Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962); and Shapin, Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as If It was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority (Baltimore, 2010).
52 Boëthius, Om statslivet, 18. Boëthius’s choice to compare geopolitics to meteorology was not a coincidence, given the notoriously uncertain prognostications of meteorology and Kjellén’s attempts at geopolitical prognostication.
53 Boëthius, Om statslivet, 18–22.
54 Steffen, Sociologi, part 4, 756ff, 770ff; Boëthius, Om statslivet, 20 (note 1).
55 Kjellén, ‘Försök till ett statsformernas naturliga system’, in Festskrift till Pontus Fahlbeck (Lund, 1915), 121–49, at 124, 145f. German translation: Kjellén, ‘Versuch eines natürlichen Systems der Staatsformen’, Schmidt and Grabowsky’s Zeitschrift für Politik 8 (1915): 427–451.
56 Boëthius, Om statslivet, 20f.
57 Kjellén, Staten som lifsform (Stockholm, 1916), 38.
58 K. Rob. V. Wikman, ‘Etnologiens problemställning’ I and II, Nya Argus 9 (1916): 53–6, 59–61, at 61.
59 Kjellén, Staten som lifsform, 1f.
60 In Beyond good and evil, Friedrich Nietzsche writes that, ‘In this France of intellect, which is also a France of pessimism, Schopenhauer has perhaps become more at home, and more indigenous than he has ever been in Germany; not to speak of Heinrich Heine … ; or of Hegel, who at present, in the form of Taine – the first of living historians – exercises an almost tyrannical influence’. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886), ed. Helen Zimmern (New York, 1907), 214. Incidentally, Georg Brandes and Stefan Zweig wrote their doctoral dissertations on Taine.
61 See Kjellén’s critique of Taine’s emphasis on the environment to the detriment of personal agency in entry 85 of his unpublished notebook. Kjellén-Björkquist, Rudolf Kjellén, vol. 1, p. 92.
62 What I have rendered as ‘regularity’ in English corresponds to lagbundenhet and Gesetzmäßigkeit in Swedish and German, respectively. With a neologism, one might call it ‘lawboundedness’ in English, i.e. the idea of being bound by some law, be it a law of nature, a law of history, of jurisprudence, of economics, or otherwise.
63 Boëthius, Om statslivet, 22–6.
64 Ibid., 23.
65 Gunnar Rexius, ‘Studien zur Staatslehre der historischen Schule’, Historische Zeitschrift 107 (1911): 496–539, at 504.
66 Boëthius, Om statslivet, 24.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid., 25.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid., 25f.
71 Ludwig Gumplowicz, Geschichte der Staatstheorien (1905), ed. Gottfried Salomon (Innsbruck, 1926).
72 Kjellén, Stormakterna. Konturer kring samtidens storpolitik, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (Stockholm, 1911–1913), vol. 4, Förenta staterna, Ryssland, Japan, slutsatser (1913), 254. See also Kjellén, Staten som lifsform, 67, 72, 131f.
73 Kjellén’s writings on a federation of European states should not be seen in the contexts of the European Union or NATO, which are different constructions in later historical contexts that he could not have imagined. In other words, they should not be read with presentist glasses (as done by Ola Tunander). Instead, they should be read in the contexts of the early twentieth-century discussions of a federation of European states – not least those by Friedrich Naumann and Ernst Jäckh –, discussions that Kjellén was fully aware of and cited liberally. Naumann, Mellaneuropa (1915), trans. Dagmar Sommarström, ed. Karl Hildebrand (Uppsala, 1917); Franz von Liszt, Ett mellaneuropeiskt statsförbund (Stockholm, 1914); Gunnar Rexius, ‘Problemet “Mellaneuropa”. Några anteckningar’, Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift 19, no. 5 (1916): 284–301; Felix Gilbert, ‘Mitteleuropa: The Final Stage’, Journal of Central European Affairs 7 (1947): 58–67.
74 Kjellén, Stormakterna, 2nd ed., vol. 4, Förenta staterna, Ryssland, Japan, slutsatser, 255f.
75 Kjellén, Stormakterna, 2nd ed., vol. 1, F. d. stormakter samt Österrike-Ungern och Italien (1911), 24f.
76 Boëthius, Om statslivet, 26.
77 Oswald Spengler, The decline of the West: Form and actuality (1918), ed. Charles Francis Atkinson (London, 1926), xv.
78 Wilhelm Roscher, Politik. Geschichtliche Naturlehre der Monarchie, Aristokratie und Demokratie (1892), 3rd ed. (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1908). This book inspired Kjellén’s works on forms of government, Statsformernas system, especially the final unpublished lecture series at Uppsala in 1921. On Roscher, see Otto Hintze, ‘Roschers politische Entwickelungstheorie’, Schmollers Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft 21 (1897): 767–811; and Iain McDaniel, ‘The politics of historical economics: Wilhelm Roscher on democracy, socialism and caesarism’, Modern Intellectual History 15, no. 1 (2018): 93–122.
79 Kjellén ‘read Seeley’s Expansion of England (1883) and was impressed with the assertion that history must be ‘scientific in its method’; this was an idea common to many social scientists at that time, such as Comte, Marx, and Spencer. Later, Seeley extended this aim to the political sciences (Introduction to Political Science).… Although it is not clear whether Kjellén read Seeley’s Introduction, he certainly shared his approach to political science’. Georg Andrén, ‘Kjellén, Rudolf’, International encyclopedia of the social sciences 8 (1968): 413f. J. R. Seeley, The expansion of England: Two courses of lectures (London, 1883); Seeley, Introduction to political science: Two series of lectures (London, 1896). On Seeley, see Duncan Bell, Reordering the world: Essays on liberalism and empire (Princeton, 2016), 265–96.
80 Karl Popper, The poverty of historicism (1944–1945) (London and New York, 1957), 109f. ‘The poverty of historicism’ was first published in 1944 and 1945 as three articles in the journal Economica, of which Friedrich Hayek was the editor.
81 Thomas Carlyle, On heroes, hero-worship, & the heroic in history (New York, 1841), 34.
82 Carlyle, Franska revolutionen, trans. Otto Wilhelm Ålund, 3 vols. (Stockholm, 1884–1885). Original publication: Carlyle, The French revolution: A history, 3 vols. (London, 1837).
83 Boëthius, Den franska revolutionen. Dess orsaker och inre historia (1789–1799) (Stockholm, 1887), 4.
84 Gert Hornwall, ‘Mellan historia och “biopolitik”: Axel Brusewitz’ statsvetenskapliga program 1905–23’, Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift 87, no. 4 (1984): 313–22, at 313.
85 Harald Hjärne, Revolutionen och Napoleon. Några drag och synpunkter (Stockholm, 1911); Axel Brusewitz, ‘Ur den nyare Napoleonlitteraturen. Några synpunkter och problem’, Historisk tidskrift 26 (1906): 153–81.
Hjärne’s book Karl XII. Omstörtningen i Östeuropa 1697–1703 (Stockholm, 1902) exhibits his grand estimation of an individual statesman’s free will and impact on the course of history. It could be read partly as a response to August Strindberg’s critical play Karl XII (1901). Hjärne’s studies of King Charles XII of Sweden were part of a contemporary revival of interest in and admiration for that king. Strindberg criticized the hero worship of Charles XII again in 1910, leading to the Strindberg feud. Incidentally, Rudolf Kjellén also participated in this feud between radicals and conservatives, taking the side of the latter, which included Sven Hedin and Verner von Heidenstam. As a prominent member of the Swedish Academy from 1903 until 1922, Hjärne was crucial to deciding the Nobel Prize winner in Literature (Heidenstam among them). In his 1946 dissertation, Staffan Björck showed, among other things, how Heidenstam was inspired by Kjellén. See Björck, Heidenstam och sekelskiftets Sverige. Studier i hans nationella och sociala författarskap (Stockholm).
86 Kjellén, Staten som lifsform, 38.