In the 1960s, people across the West started imagining that theywere in a societal transition. Crucially, in these future-orienteddiscussions, social class was often transformed into educationalattainment as the main dividing line. These future studies garneredattention across the political spectrum, including the SwedishConservative Party. This article aims to investigate theConservative Party’s considerations on the societal and future roleof education during the 1960s and 1970s. I show how theConservative Party was one of the first proponents in articulatingvisions of the post-industrial society in Sweden. It saw the societalchanges it brought about as its chance to realign the electorate andthe political landscape in its favour. The educated voter was constructedby the Conservative Party as a new leading class ina society centred around education. The article contributes to thehistory of educational ideas of the 1960s and 1970s, educationalclassifications, futurology and post-industrial ideas.

This article investigates an important but understudied phenomenon: the bureaucratic class division, which is analysed as a difference technology for envisioning, studying and managing the population. I examine a long-lived and widely spread taxonomy of the Swedish population into three social groups (Socialgrupper). Specifically, I look at how it influenced the production of statistics and knowledge about the voter during the first half of the twentieth century and higher education in the post-war welfare state era. The article understands the effects of the taxonomy as a ‘scientisation of the social’, using Lutz Raphael's term, in which fuzzy conceptual class boundaries were turned into exact classification, making it possible for different actors to act and calculate through them. The division was at the same time contested among social scientists and politicians. However, because of lack of alternatives and because it was well established, actors continued using it.

During the twentieth century, a number of actors and institutions acrossthe global north set out to develop hierarchical social taxonomies of their national populations. Mainly used for the making of statistics, these divisions soon came to be influential in policy and public debates. Using mainly Swedish examples, this article offers new ways of understanding social taxonomies, thereby adding insights into an understudied research object within the field of history of knowledge. Social taxonomies connect mundane and practical aspects of knowledge in the making – in terms of how actors order empirical material to through these create statistics – with larger public debates on society. They are, moreover, linked to different epistemic and political projects. I argue that social taxonomies should be understood as difference technologies; that is, ways of ordering and studying the social by producing differences between and sameness within its classifications.

This article investigates the media lives of a particular class taxonomy in the Swedish press from 1945 to 1976. Invented by the Central Bureau of Statistics in 1911, the ‘social group division’ system was abandoned in the early post-war period. Around the same time, however, it gained popularity in Swedish culture and political debate. While earlier research has noted that such bureaucratic class taxonomies – as in several other Western countries – conditioned how actors understood and created new knowledge about the population, this process of wider circulation remains understudied. Using insights from literature on ‘the social life of methods’ and the history of knowledge, which underline that knowledge is transformed by and transforms the contexts it circulates in, I show that print media was an arena for circulating and producing new meaning around class taxonomies. Although editorials shunned the social group division for incorrectly representing Swedish society and creating artificial class boundaries, journalists used the taxonomy to explain social structures. Furthermore, by interviewing ‘typical’ members of the different social groups, journalists made the system relatable and personal for their readers. In this context, the social groups were imagined as cultural communities, sharing cultural behaviours and preferences. Lastly, I analyse usages of the social group division in letters to the editor, which reveal that people felt they were being classified and wanted to offer their views of society, using the taxonomy in ways the experts had not intended. This study thereby contributes to the history of social taxonomies and class languages in the post-war period.

This article investigates the creation and circulation of class knowledge among Sweden’s political parties as Swedish representative democracy took shape, 1911–1940. When the expanded franchise for men was introduced in the general election of 1911, the National Statistics Bureau (SCB) was tasked with categorising voters to measure the effects of the reform. They created a taxonomy made up of three social groups. The study situates this innovation in election statistics in the general interest in social class, which was used as a frame for understanding and intervening in societal matters around 1900. The political scientist Pontus Fahlbeck’s influence on SCB is considered. His taxonomy of society, created 1892, reflected his conviction that a class structure was vital for maintaining and developing Western civilisation and its culture. However, the political parties soon found a way of using SCB’s divisions for their own ends, mobilising it for a variety of political projects. For the Social Democratic Party, the numerical majority of social group III – a class they claimed to represent – legitimised their claim to rule. The conservative parties instead focused on how in their view they were truly democratic because their voters were drawn from all social groups. The article uses insights from the cultural history of statistics – a field which holds numbers to be a form of communication, and which underlines how phenomena and concepts change when quantified – to contribute to the history of class concepts. I show how class was made into statistics, transforming it from a fuzzy category into something concrete, exact, and calculable. Election statistics and Fahlbeck’s taxonomy were the political parties’ shared resource in their pursuit of election wins. Through this process, a common understanding of Swedish society as ordered into three societal groups was established, which would prove highly influential continuing into the second half of the twentieth century.

During the 20th century, a number of actors and institutions set out to develop taxonomies of the Swedish population. This thesis examines the most im­portant social classification system, the social group, which despite its great importance in administrative, scientific, commercial, political and media con­texts has received little attention in historical research. Invented by the Central Bureau of Statistics in 1911 to map voters according to their social position, the division enabled Swedes to be hierarchized under the categories of social group I, II or III. The taxonomy became a standard for a number of knowledge-producing institu­tions in their studies of the Swedish class structure: for the nascent market research companies and their assessments of consumers from the 1930s on­wards; for the polling companies’ surveys of public opinion from the 1940s onwards; and for the post-war social science research and government com­mittees’ statistical production about higher education.

The thesis analyses classification systems in use and in movement between actors and contexts. Social taxonomies are understood as difference technol­ogies: by which I mean ways of mapping and studying populations. They link populations together, quantify concepts into precise classifications and enable specific overviews of social structures – knowledge that can then be used as a basis for action and societal interventions. Moreover, the social group division was widely discussed in post-war Swedish press and mediated into images and tables. Actors within media interpreted and used it differently, and as a result, new meaning was created around it. The division was presented by some as cultural communities, while others pointed to it as evidence of a new social phase, characterised by declining class conflicts. Finally, it became the focus for meta-reflections on the societal place and impact of social divisions. Through these mediated engagements, the taxonomy became a given yet con­tested part of the Swedish public sphere.

This article studies the rise of market research and opinion surveys in Sweden from the 1930s and onward. By focusing on the promotion of empirical knowledge by actors between the academic and the commercial world, such as the economist Gerhard Törnqvist, the article shows how new practices of classifying consumers into social classes were established among marketers and advertisers. These approaches were passed on to the Swedish Gallup, which produced opinion surveys from the early 1940s. The final section of the article charts Swedish newspapers’ preoccupation with classifying practices of the Swedish population into classes. The article investigates market research and opinion surveys through following “the social life of methods”, a theoretical perspective that sees methods of knowledge as political. I analyze how a class taxonomy constructed by the Swedish statistical bureau in 1911 migrated and became productive in the commercial sector starting in the 1930s. These taxonomies could be called “difference machines” in that they repeatedly produced statistical differences as new knowledge.

Why was the group seen as a new and promising political and scientific category in the Swedish interwar period, and why was the category redefined in the postwar era? This article sets out to answer these questions through a study of Torgny T. Segerstedt and his analysis of the group category. Lorraine Dastons notion that in scientific practice the epistemology effects the ontology of the studied object is used as a theoretical framework to show how the study of the group should be situated in two different contexts.

In the interwar period, Segerstedt, like other philosophers, turned to social psychology and borrowed the group category from American and English discussions. The category was seen as pivotal in the understanding and upholding of democracy in an era of totalitarianism. People without a strong sense of group belongingness easily turned into masses, emotional, irrational, and mobilized to obey a dictator. Segerstedt instead believed the ideal society to be made up of primary groups, such as the family. Putting forward the group category as a new way of seeing society Segerstedt also criticized other concepts like the individual, race, and class. These interwar texts about the group were meant to contribute to both science and a general democratic discussion. The epistemology was that of an ”armchair observer”, in Haaro Maas words, i.e. someone who compiles knowledge from others to create new syntheses.

In the newly formed social sciences of the postwar period, a new ideal arose. Disciplines like sociology were supposed to solve welfare problems, and their research was aimed at specialized publics. Torgny T. Segerstedt became the first professor of sociology in Sweden and made the group category the center of the discipline. However, the group was now supposed to help with wellbeing at work and general adjustment in society. Influenced by American neopositivist sociology he stated that sociology’s goal was to measure and statistically account for different groups and to discover where the norms in the groups came from. This new epistemology changed how the group category was conceptualized, as it became more hierarchical. The study shows how scientific research in the social sciences changes when turning from one way of observing to another.

I denna artikel undersöks gruppkategorin, som är en teori om att samhällen består av ett antal sammanhållande grupper vilka socialiserar och integrerar sina medlemmar genom normer, och som var ett nytt sätt att tänka under svensk mellankrigstid och efterkrigstid. Studien uppmärksammar särskilt filosofen och sociologen Torgny T. Segerstedt. Grupp har under 1900-talet gått från att ses som ett nytt och spännande begrepp till att vara en i närmast självklar del i hur vi förstår samhället. Artikeln visar hur politiska kontexter och epistemologier var djupt sammanbundna med hur samhället konceptualiserades inom modern samhällsvetenskap.