Research Project Description and Contribution to CAS ROH Project

The aim of my study is to re-evaluate what has been considered the modern breakthrough in Swedish historiography, namely the emergence of a group of historians centred round the brothers Lauritz and Curt Weibull in the first half of the twentieth century. The name Weibull has been rarely mentioned without reference to source criticism, whereby the prominence of source criticism as a basis for disciplinary identity-building in the Swedish historical profession has been acknowledged as internationally unique. Source criticism was not only the core method of the Swedish historian, it also happened to be a highly sophisticated means of exposing political propaganda. Hence, the historian could contribute to a free and open society.

Although this view of the Weibullian heritage has been nuanced, some essential characteristics are still missing. The Weibull historians were no crude proponents of methodical technique or unartistic collectors of facts. Their writing was certainly no effortless or ‘objective' reports from the archives or the seminar-room, in fact it was regarded by themselves as the essential part of the professional historians' activity. Certainly, one of their most striking features is the stylistic capabilities they put to use, their conscious and very active grasp of disposition and line of argument. Though seldom shaping their writing as traditional, epic historical narrative, and therefore, with few exceptions, never reaching wide audiences with their writings, there is always a conscious plot at work, an author's personality directing history, with quirks of subtle irony and deliberate clues: all adding rhetorical momentum to the final and often subversive conclusion. The Weibull historians had a distinct style when writing history.

There is good reason to believe that this aspect of the Weibullian history-writing has been left out or downplayed. A comparison of style could prove devastating to the ideal of scholarly progress; the view of twentieth-century academic professionalism just might seem less of a fulfilment from this perspective.

The shift in perspective towards style would imply a new frame of reference to this field. To what extent could weibullianism be described as a modernist movement instead of modern school? The Weibullians have been referred to as a school but have also been closely connected to a fundamental myth of the avant-garde, as ‘destroyer' of tradition. In the Weibullians' case this destruction consisted of the banishing of nineteenth-century century bourgeois morality from historical interpretation.

An anomaly can be discerned in previous research about the Weibullians. The will to summon them as a part of the grand narrative of modern democratic progress does not explain why many of their characteristics seem challenging or even rebelling against such a narrative. Though the Weibullians were regarded as radicals, their view of history was always too extreme and dystopic to be adopted by political interests in Sweden. Even the main radical party, the Social democrats, has been acknowledged to have been unable to make use of their history, but instead aligned themselves with the more nationalist and conservative views that the Weibullians held in contempt. The view of the Weibullians as a modernist movement could possibly solve this anomaly.

Modernist ideologies range all across the political spectrum. The political views held by modernists often seem more or less incidental. In fact, modernism can be seen as a deliberate loss of coherence in the modern personality. What has been seen as intellectual limitations, the anthropological reductionism of the Weibullian historical interpretations could perhaps be labelled a modernist dehumanisation of history (to reinterpret Ortega y Gasset, 1948).

This also constitutes a major comparative possibility of this study. The avant-garde identities of modernist art, had a notoriously ambiguous temporal character. As these identities were often based in a highly individualistic revolt against modernity, they could, from modernity´s perspective just as well take the form of radical backwardness (primitivism in painting), as well as progressiveness. There is no reason that the view of modernist culture should be limited to the literary and artistic movements of mid-western Europe. The ambiguous temporal identity at the heart of modernism made it a puzzling and unpredictable phenomenon. This makes comparison challenging, but also very interesting to pursue.