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This book highlights the diverse roles of the humanities in the history of the Swedish welfare society. This society has often been seen as dominated by an instrumental view of knowledge that rewarded the social sciences, natural sciences and technology, but the contributions in this book show the significant role that the humanities played in the Swedish welfare state. Various forms of humanistic knowledge and knowledge actors were part of large networks and left a clear mark on the public sphere and society at large. A narrative of the marginalization and crisis of the humanities in the postwar period must therefore be problematized. This edited volume brings together some twenty scholars from a number of humanities disciplines (history, history of ideas, media history, literary studies, archaeology, education, etc.). Much of the current research on the history of the humanities conducted in Sweden today is brought together here and put in relation to international discussions in fields such as history of humanities, history of knowledge, etc. The book is a sibling to the monograph Humanister i offentligheten, which was published in 2022.

There is a strong narrative on how the humanities were marginalized in postwar Sweden: in the land of engineers, technocrats and social scientists, there was no room for erudition, philosophy and history. This book challenges such a notion and shows how clearly the humanities were present in the public sphere of the time. By applying perspectives from the history of knowledge, the authors illustrate how humanists were key figures in the welfare society's culture and politics, media and book market, education and intellectual debate.
At the heart of the book is the public sphere of the 1960s and 1970s. In a first part, the authors highlight how humanists played a decisive role in the young television's educational program as well as in the popular science paperback publishing of the time and on the essay pages in the newspapers. In a second part, attention is drawn to the humanities' place in the Christian cultural sphere, the labour movement's education work and the New Left's book cafés. We meet people like Per I. Gedin, Gunnel Vallquist and Jan-Öjvind Swahn, but also TV producers, study circle organizers, translators of radical non-fiction and many others. They all helped to set humanistic knowledge in motion during the postwar decades.
Against an international background, the image of a humanistic knowledge system with deep roots and wide connections in Swedish society emerges. It is about these actors and arenas of knowledge that this book is about.