Anne Berg

The Capitalist State and the Construction of Civil Society : Public Funding and the Regulation of Popular Education in Sweden, 1870–1991

This book challenges the idea that a sharp boundary should be drawn between the state and civil society. Although this idea is extremely common in modern capitalist societies, here it is turned on ...

Capitalist States and Civil Societies

This is a book about the modern capitalist state, and about how public financial support has been used to enable, shape and regulate voluntary collective action in what is often referred to as “civil society”. An analysis of the capitalist state is a large and almost hubristic task to attempt, unless some clear limitations are set. The period we have chosen corresponds to the development of industrial capitalist social systems in Europe and the United States, from the 1870s to the 1990s.

Independent yet Functional and Rational

Securing and enabling – in a way making – a range of institutional forms must be understood as a kind of productive power. Yet the quest for influence did not stop there. This chapter argues that the effect of the grant system was a circumscribed freedom that was functional for the established order. This conclusion is based on an analysis of how the conditions for and bureaucratic implementation of the appropriations served as political techniques to guide and influence popular education organisations. In particular, their organisational structure, ideological content and relations to local public institutions were the focus of government attention. At the same time, conduct functional for the purposes of the state was secured by a specific system of surveillance, utilising modern techniques of power such as documentation, confessions, knowledge production and concrete inspections.

Autonomisation, or, Governing the Evolution of Freedom

In this and the following chapter, we show that, in Sweden, voluntary popular education was governed by means of a strategy we call autonomisation. This strategy was established in the early 1870s and would be passed down to the next century. Autonomisation is usually defined as a process of making things self-sufficient, independent or free. In its original French sense, the word also encompasses a process of granting something power, of empowering. This double meaning – enabling/empowering – is what makes the expression apt as a description of the specific kind of power which the government exercised from the 1870s to the 1990s through the use of financial grants. Yet the state of autonomy which the government fashioned was a functional kind of freedom; it was freedom in the eyes of the government. Over the 120 years that this strategy was in play, changes certainly occurred. The biggest is the historical process of bureaucratisation and rationalisation, which were deployed to reproduce popular education as a sector of self-governing, voluntary forms of learning. But before we can move on to how this political strategy turned out during the twentieth century, we need to examine the basis for it.

Designing Popular Education

In the previous chapter, we discussed what might be called the “external” governance mechanisms of popular education in the twentieth century: the implications of the size and character of government appropriations, and the organisational structure of popular education, with its largely corporatist character. These mechanisms formed popular education into a governable cluster of organisations.

Autonomisation and Bureaucratisation in the Welfare State Era

From the 1910s, a more active government policy on popular education was pursued in Sweden. It built on the earlier foundation: on the one hand presenting popular education as an autonomous sphere associated with the notion of civil society, and on the other regulating it in various ways through the government grant system. In the twentieth century, however, popular education developed into a mass phenomenon, in parallel with the rise of the modern welfare state in Sweden, just as in other Western capitalist countries. With this came rapid growth of the government apparatus and of public expenditure. Popular education was part of this development, in terms of both the level of subsidies and the size of the organisational apparatus for its governance.