1st Edition
The Social Scientific Gaze The Social Question and the Rise of Academic Social Science in Sweden
Introduction: The testament
1. The social question: Arenas, actors, articulations
2. The international context: research and reform in Germany and Britain
3. Viktor Lorén: An unremarked intellectual
4. The board: A network and its thought style
5. Library and lectures: A social geography of knowledge
6. Surveying the social: With letters and numbers
7. The rise of academic social science: Wicksell, Steffen, Cassel
8. The social scientific gaze: Between the social question and the rise of academic social science
9. Appendix: The Lorén Foundation's series of publications, 1890-1899
Biography
Per Wisselgren is Associate Professor of Sociology, with a PhD in History of Science and Ideas, at Umeå University in Sweden. Previous books include Social Science in Context: Historical, Sociological and Global Perspectives (co-edited, 2013), Couples in Science and Politics: Intellectual Marriages in Modernity (co-edited in Swedish, 2011), and History of Participatory Media: Politics and Publics, 1750-2000 (co-edited, 2011).
'Wisselgren does an outstanding job of explaining who the participants were, the role of literature, the details of the decision-making process and finances of the foundation. He reveals the complexity of a series of events that might pass unnoticed, and recaptures the motives and actions of people who were not important social scientists, but who were the enthusiasts for social science that made possible social science as an institutional fact.' - Professor Stephen Turner in the latest issue of Serendipities: Journal for the Sociology and History of the Social Sciences
'Per Wisselgren has written a remarkable account of an extraordinary series of events in the period of pre-academic reformist social science.' – Serendipity: Journal for the Sociology and History of the Social Sciences
'Abroad, Sweden's welfare state system is as famous as the four letter furniture store. Fewer people are familiar with the socio-historical background of the first. Per Wisselgren's book offers a detailed portrait of the debates on the 19th century social question and the rise of the social sciences which lead to the model welfare system.' – Christian Fleck, University of Graz, Austria
‘As a study in the sociology of knowledge, this is an exemplary book. It is deeply theoretical, richly empirical, and engagingly written.’ – Annulla Linders, Contemporary Sociology
