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Axel Hägerström

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Axel Hägerström (1868–1939) was professor of practical philosophy at Uppsala from 1911 to 1933, founder of the Uppsala school of philosophy and the intellectual source of Scandinavian legal realism. His inaugural lecture of 1911, “Om moraliska föreställningars sanning” (“On the truth of moral ideas”), concluded that there can never be a scientific morals, only a science of morals — the doctrine critics named Value nihilism (värdenihilism).

Hägerström attacked the Boströmian idealism that had dominated Swedish philosophy, insisting that only the spatio-temporal world of causal regularities can be known, and that values, duties, and rights have no place in it. Rights he analyzed as belief in a supernatural power over things and persons — a survival of word magic, not a feature of reality. His jurisprudential histories argued that Roman and modern rights concepts carried this magical metaphysics.

Politically he was a radical with left-leaning, social democratic sympathies, and his critique targeted conservative natural law. In the 1913 essay “Om sociala vidskepelser” (“On social superstitions”), published in the Social Democratic journal Tiden, he treated the rights of man as an example of incomplete enlightenment: a historically useful superstition that had served democratic and socialist movements, but a “mantle in which both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, both a Rockefeller and a Marat, can dress their social ideas,” and one he saw in 1913 as chiefly serving capital. His 1931 essay “Om social rättvisa” argued that absolute rights-talk turns conflicts of interest into religious wars, citing the French Terror, and predicted that such superstitions would be superfluous in an egalitarian society.

After his death in 1939, critics blamed the value-nihilist theory for the collapse of European culture and the rise of totalitarianism, in newspaper pieces such as “Prof Hägerström och världskrisen” and “Hitler och Hägerström.” The Scandinavian Value Nihilists reconstructs that debate and the defenses mounted by Ingemar Hedenius, Herbert Tingsten, and Alf Ross. Scandinavian Legal Realism and Human Rights traces his rights critique and its afterlife in the Nordic human-rights discussion. Sven Eliæson has described him as the theoretician of the modern Swedish state in its etatist, social democratic welfare tradition.

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