ABSTRACT
The idea that the humanities serve an essential function for democracy has become one of the most influential claims for their value to society. However, in the twentieth-century Swedish welfare state, the humanities struggled to secure democratic legitimacy as they were excluded from the main strands of politics of knowledge. A younger generation eventually embraced this experience of marginalization and strove to mobilize knowledge in the humanities in novel ways. They thus paved the way for a new strategy of legitimization based on a relationship to democracy that depicted humanities scholars as rebels in line with the popular “gadfly” claim of current debates – in contrast to how they, traditionally, were regarded as a “guide of souls,” instructing people from “above.”
