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Herbert Tingsten

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Herbert Tingsten (1896–1973) was a Swedish political scientist and publicist, professor of political science at Stockholms högskola from 1935 to 1946 and editor-in-chief of Dagens Nyheter from 1946 to 1959. A pioneer of empirical election research with Political Behavior (1937), he became the most influential Swedish democratic theorist of his century through Demokratiens seger och kris (1933) and Demokratiens problem (1945). Within the vault he matters as one of the three democratically minded followers of Axel Hägerström — with Ingemar Hedenius and Alf Ross — who answered the “crisis of democracy” charge that Value nihilism had disarmed democracy before totalitarianism.1

Career

Tingsten was born in Järfälla on 17 March 1896, doctorated at Uppsala in 1924 on referendums in the United States, and worked there as researcher and teacher before taking the Lars Hierta chair in political science at Stockholms högskola in 1935. His early scholarship moved between constitutional history, constitutional law, and political idea-history, culminating in the idea-analytical study De konservativa idéerna (1939) and the election-statistical Political Behavior (1937), a founding work of modern electoral research. In 1946 he left the academy for the editor’s chair at DN, where his campaign-driven liberal leader writing — against communism, colonialism, apartheid, and Swedish neutrality — set the agenda of Swedish public debate until the ATP conflict with the Bonnier owners forced his departure at the end of 1959. He died in Stockholm on 26 December 1973.23

A second-hand Hägerströmian

Tingsten’s relation to Uppsala philosophy was real but mediated. In his autobiography he reports reading only Hägerström’s more popular writings, and his acquaintance with the doctrine came largely at second hand; Strang classifies him, following Bernt Skovdal, as an “associated member” of the circle of younger Uppsala intellectuals who were replacing Hägerström with international analytic philosophy. Value nihilism functioned for him less as an elaborated theory than as a self-evident starting point: moral and political questions came down to personal convictions and voluntaristic decisions that science can neither justify nor refute.1

Democracy without metaphysics

In both major democracy books Tingsten rejected the traditional justifications of democracy as resting either on the metaphysics of natural law or on concealed personal valuations. He was equally unwilling to accept Hans Kelsen’s relativist defense: Kelsen had not clarified the decisive difference between an absolutist and a relativist attitude, and there were fascists who used “relativism” as an argument for their own politics.1 What remained was a sociological grounding. Democracy works where a people in fact shares basic values, and its procedure is majoritarian; the proofs of democracy’s value “in the dogmatic form they have traditionally been presented” are invalid, but they contain a core of truth as descriptions of the values a democratic citizenry actually holds. On the rare occasions he made a direct moral appeal — as in a 1948 speech to Uppsala students — it took the existentialist form that “we must consciously act in accordance with our valuations” because “we are alone, and the responsibility is ours.”1 Ross’s formal conception of democracy in Hvorfor demokrati? closely resembled this idea of democracy as a supra-ideological procedure.1

Tingsten in the vault

The Scandinavian Value Nihilists documents Tingsten’s part in the defense of democracy on value-nihilist premises, and Value nihilism summarizes the shared position: democracy grounded in the sociological fact of shared basic values and majoritarian procedure, not in metaphysical rights. His trajectory also marks the political range the doctrine permitted: a Social Democrat in his youth, he left the party in the early 1940s and became Sweden’s leading liberal editor — the same anti-totalitarian endpoint as Hedenius and Ross, reached through journalism rather than jurisprudence or moral philosophy. Ingemar Hedenius later wrote his biography, Herbert Tingsten (1974).

  1. The Scandinavian Value Nihilists (Johan Strang, NORDEUROPAforum 2009); saved copy. ↩↩↩↩↩

  2. “Herbert Tingsten,” Nationalencyklopedin, ne.se. ↩

  3. “Herbert Tingsten (1896–1973),” Tingstensamlingen, Stockholm University, tingstensamlingen.se/doc/herbert_tingsten. ↩

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