Bringing Bildung into the History of Political Thought: Revisiting the Historiography of the Scandinavian Citizen

This article traces how the German concept of Bildung – and its Scandinavian translations bildning, danning and dannelse – has shaped, and continues to shape, the history of political thought in the Scandinavian (post-)welfare states. Rather than treating these concepts solely as educational doctrines, it approaches them as political ideas in action that have shaped visions of the ideal citizen and the just society from the nineteenth century to the present. The article reconstructs shifting regimes of subject formation and social engineering under social democracy with the late twentieth-century anxieties of the emerging knowledge economy. It argues that contemporary debates over Bildung unfold within a forcefield structured by three emblematic agencies – the Father, the Financer and the Fraud – through which Bildung is alternately sacralised, economised or instrumentalised as a resource for national ethos, neoliberal subjectivity and neo-conservative populist revisionism. Resisting both nostalgic and technocratic appropriations, the article calls for a renewed history and philosophy of education that is attentive to its own historiographical practices and their political performativity. By conceptualising bildning, danning and dannelse as multi-temporal, affect-laden and contested formations, it proposes a future-oriented historiography capable of illuminating how ideas of subject formation organise present struggles over democracy, welfare and collective life.