DEEP GENETICS: UNIVERSAL HISTORY AND THE SPECIES

The popularity of books such as Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind suggests that universal history‐writing has a continuous not a broken past. Rather than “returning,” it is perhaps the most enduring genre of all. This review essay explores the deep‐history element of universal histories and the ongoing purchase of the stadial tradition for a new history of the species. Why are deep histories of the species so reliably appealing, and what do they mean in the twenty‐first century? Although the Anthropocene would seem to be the pertinent context for this ongoing historiography, this essay suggests that the new domain of genetic genealogy powerfully individualizes and commercializes deep history for neoliberal times.     

Transnational Constructors of Parliamentary Democracy in Swedish and Finnish Constitutional Controversies, 1917–1919

During the First World War, the legitimacy of established polities was challenged everywhere in Europe. Not only the combatant great powers but also smaller states witnessed a resurgence of constitutional disputes and competing ideological conceptualizations of revolution and reform, the will of the people, democracy, and parliamentarism. While these controversies primarily focused on the future of the national polities concerned, historical experiences and discourses accelerated by the war and the Russian Revolution were transnationally interconnected and contributed to discursive transfers between political cultures. Swedish and Finnish socialists were linked by their internationals, liberals were connected by transnational debates for and against ‘Western’ democracy and parliamentarism, and conservative politicians and academics were involved in ideologically oriented networks. This article reconstructs transnational links and discourses in order to understand the exceptionally confrontational dynamics (which, in Finland, partly led to a civil war) and the outcomes of the Swedish and Finnish constitutional debates in 1917–1919. It examines the nature of the transnational connections of eight Swedish and Finnish conservatives, liberals, revisionist socialists, and far-Left socialists, analysing their argumentation on constitutional questions in published works and parliamentary speeches as illustrative examples of the political groups they represented.     

SOCIALIST COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES AND THE SPRING OF 1917

The Russian Revolution of 1917 presented Swedish Social Democrats with a dilemma: how could they use the transnational revolutionary momentum to further universal suffrage, without supporting actions possibly leading to violence? In striking this balance, the use of communications was central. This article uses the concept of the media system to analyse the communicative practices and strategies developed by the Party in the early 20th century, and how these were employed between 1915 and 1917, in relation to the hunger marches and revolutionary pressures. The study shows that the Party had established conscious agitation strategies and an elaborate national communication structure, which enabled coordinated opinion activities. As early as 1915, the Party began using these tools to initiate a national opinion movement concerning the food situation. In 1917, faced with the combination of events in Russia and erupting hunger marches, the Party leadership chose to emphasize security and stability, focusing on events the Party could control, such as the 1 May demonstrations. The resulting development of revolutionary opinion in Sweden during the spring of 1917 and the ensuing political changes reflected conscious media management strategies by the Left, who used the media system to navigate and shape a transnational revolutionary moment.     

METHOD AND MEANING: RANKE AND DROYSEN ON THE HISTORIAN'S DISCIPLINARY ETHOS

In this article I revisit nineteenth-century debates over historical objectivity and the political functions of historiography. I focus on two influential contributors to these debates: Leopold von Ranke and Johann Gustav Droysen. In their takes on objectivity and subjectivity, impartiality and political engagement, I reveal diametrically opposed solutions to shared concerns: how can historians reveal history to be meaningful without resorting to speculative philosophy? And how can they produce a knowledge that is relevant to the present when the project of “exemplary” history has been abandoned? I focus especially on the relativist themes in Ranke's and Droysen's answers to these questions. Ranke's demand for impartiality leads him to think of all historical epochs as equally valid, whereas Droysen's emphasis on subjectivity relativizes historical truth. In order to explain why Ranke and Droysen nevertheless remained unfazed by the problem of historical relativism, I analyze their normative conceptions of the historian's disciplinary ethos. I show that Ranke and Droysen think of objective impartiality and subjective partiality not only in methodological terms but also in terms of justice and ethical duty. By way of this normative element, their historical methodologies secure for the professional study of history an ethical-political relevance for the present.