Mattias Bourne

Marquis W. Childs and Sweden Mattias Bourne

For almost a hundred years the political left has attempted to use Sweden as a model for other countries. This book follows the history of how this has been done, from its inception in the 1930s to the current plethora of global surveys and rankings claiming to measure such things as modernity and rule of law. Throughout, we can see how the left has misused, first a certain form of ethnography, later political science and sociology, and, today, global surveys and rankings. Most importantly, representatives of Swedish officialdom and American fellow travellers have colluded in obfuscating and lying about the relation between freedom and welfare in Sweden. Based on a fine-grained anthropological analysis and the voices of internal Swedish critics, a completely different image of Sweden emerges. The main point about the Swedish model is not so much its economic policy and its social programmes. Instead, it is a lack of modernity and liberal democracy. This suggests that the use of Sweden as a model may be one of the most shameless and long-lived political hoaxes of progressive social science and leftist journalism of the last hundred years.