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The Scandinavian Value Nihilists

The Crisis of Democracy in the 1930s and 1940s

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Johan Strang’s 2009 article in NORDEUROPAforum (saved copy) reconstructs the Scandinavian debate over whether Value nihilism — Axel Hägerström’s theory that moral judgments can be neither true nor false — helped prepare the ground for totalitarianism. It is the standard scholarly account of the “crisis of democracy” controversy that followed Hägerström’s death in 1939 and the posthumous Socialfilosofiska uppsatser.

The article documents the accusation in its contemporary form: newspaper pieces titled “Prof Hägerström och världskrisen” and “Hitler och Hägerström” argued that the theory had left a spiritual void now exploited by destructive forces, and the Social Democratic MP Anders Orne claimed the Uppsala philosophy formed “a theoretical foundation for the advance of the modern totalitarian states.” It then traces how three democratically minded followers — Ingemar Hedenius, Herbert Tingsten, and Alf Ross — answered the charge. Hedenius argued that a scientific theory cannot form the foundation for any morality at all, destructive or otherwise, and that the practical nihilist’s “everything is allowed” is itself a valuation and therefore meaningless on the theory’s own terms. Tingsten and Ross defended a formal, majoritarian conception of democracy resting on shared basic values as a sociological precondition, not a metaphysical one.

The article is a reliable secondary source by the leading historian of Uppsala philosophy, based on primary newspaper and journal material from 1940–49. Its scope is the philosophical debate; it explicitly does not treat the political consequences of Scandinavian legal realism as law, which the same author’s Scandinavian Legal Realism and Human Rights covers.

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