Introduction

The history of the humanities needs to move beyond the focus on traditional disciplines and historicize notions regarding the impact and organization of the humanities in a long historical perspective. The present edited volume, based on case studies of Sweden in the modern period, provides an important contribution to such an endeavor. This introduction proposes an analytical framework by special reference to “knowledge politics,” a concept that allows a flexible and aggregated examination of how societies have valued and politicized the organization, balancing, and circulation of knowledge on a broad scale. The national case in point provides illuminating insights into how the humanities over time had to relate to various regimes of legitimacy and enables comparisons on an international scale.