Social engineering and cultural policy – theoretical and empirical reflexions from Swedish cultural policy in a historical perspective

This article explores the influence of social engineering in various forms within Swedish cultural policy, seen in a historical perspective. In social engineering cultural policy measures, reforms and projects are justified by scientifically based research rather than party based ideological arguments. Karl Popper’s classification of the utopian and the step-by-step engineering make up the starting point, redefined as paternalistic engineering, welfare state engineering and utilitarian engineering in order to apply these ideas to cultural policy. Social engineering was predominant in Swedish cultural policy mainly during the post war period. In the 1950s as well as in the 1970s this engineering takes on a paternalistic character, in the struggle against injurious culture, such as video violence. Current practice of paternalistic engineering is directed at revealing and identifying invisibles structures in the field of cultural heritage. The welfare state engineering had its highlights in the planning era of the 1960s and the 1970s, and today culture as a beneficial factor for both citizens and society is labelled utilitarian engineering.     

Prophetic Perfectionism: The Afterlives of Nat Turner and John Brown

ABSTRACT

Recent fiction, film, art, and scholarship on nineteenth-century American abolitionists Nat Turner and John Brown shed light on the politics of their prophetic religion. Both men led violent rebellions against slavery for which they were executed. Prophetic perfectionism drove Turner and Brown but tended to fade in works about them. Exceptions to this pattern of reception include Jacob Lawrence's John Brown series (1941), Nate Parker's film The Birth of a Nation (2016), and Ted Smith's book Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics (2014). This essay situates Turner's and Brown's prophetic perfectionism and their reception in the context of contemporary political theologies and aesthetics of religion and race.