Search results

This article provides a perspective on liberal political thought in post-Cold War Finland by examining the small Young Finns party. Their political philosophy emphasised individualism against collectivism and criticised Finland's state-centred political culture. Special focus is on the party's ideas of reforming the Finnish welfare state. The Young Finns wanted to retain universal education and healthcare services but pursued radical tax, social security and labour market reforms with ideas inspired by neoliberal thinkers. The article argues that the Young Finns represented a Finnish variant of neoliberalism in their goal of retasking the welfare state into a slimmer enabler of individual freedom.

The article argues that all disciplines examining human thought could use certain shared analytical categories. This would not mean eradicating all differences between various approaches such as intellectual history and discourse analysis, but acknowledging that they are examining partly the same basic entities. The article argues that ideational entities in human thought could be understood as concepts, beliefs, and their constellations. The article discusses the views of scholars who have theorized similar categories and shows how these can be studied through historical language use. Shared analytical categories would enhance interdisciplinary dialogue between scholars of human thought and allow more rigorous debates on issues that truly divide different disciplines, such as the explanatory values of human agency and structures.

Artikkeli pohjaa VTT Ilkka Kärrylän väitöstilaisuudessaan Helsingin yliopistossa 30.11.2019 pitämään lektioon. Kärrylä käsittelee poliittisen talouden muotoutumista 1960-luvulta 1990-luvulle Suomessa ja Ruotsissa. Keskeinen jännitys rakentuu "taloudellisen demokratian" käsitteen ympärille. Perinteiselle vasemmistolle käsite tarkoitti julkista talouden suunnittelua ja ohjailua, sekä työntekijöiden valtaa työpaikoilla. Oikeiston puheessa taasen taloudellinen demokratia viittasi yksityisomistajuuden laajentamiseen sekä yhteistoimintaan työpaikoilla. Näiden näkökulmien muuttuminen ideologisten tulkintojen mukaan sisälsi myös vallitsevien uskomuksien muutoksen. Kärrylä katsoo, että etenkin globaalien haasteiden myötä taloudesta on tullut poliittista, vaikka taloudellisen demokratian käsite onkin ajautunut marginaaliin.

This article analyses the Finnish employers' policy preferences, strategies and success in the industrial democracy (ID) reform process of the 1960s–1970s. The article establishes the employers' hierarchy of preferences, evaluates how successful they were in realising their objectives, and discusses the strategic choices and contextual factors behind their successes and losses. The article engages with scholarly discussions about interest groups' policy preferences and success and emphasises the multifaceted nature and the temporal dimension of success. A sufficiently long timeframe is often necessary in order to assess the eventual winners and losers of a policy process, as well as the degrees of success attained by actors.