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International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 14, No. 3, 2001
I. Alva and Gunnar Myrdal: A Symposium on Their Lives and Works
Symposium Editors’ Introduction Stanford M. Lyman1 and Sven Eliæson2
Sponsored by the Research Committee of the History of Sociology, International Sociological Association, a symposium on the lives and works of Gunnar Myrdal (1898-1987) and Alva Myrdal (1902-1986) was presented at the meeting of the World Congress of Sociology in Montreal, in July, 1998. Sven Eliæson, professor at Stockholm University, arranged and chaired the session. The papers examined the scientific, epistemological, methodological, and policy influencing effects and implications of the Myrdals’ many writings while exploring the impact of their academic careers and numerous ventures into public service on their own and their children’s domestic lives. Of these papers, one—Stanford M. Lyman’s “Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma After a Half Century—Critics and Anticritics”—has been published in an earlier issue of this journal (Vol. 12, No. 2, 1998, pp. 327–389). Here, we present revised versions of four papers written for the aforementioned congress or developed shortly thereafter in relation to its theme. Both jointly and separately the lives and works of Gunnar and Alva Myral have influenced 20th century social thought, socioeconomic methodology, and public policy. Long associated with the ideology and praxes of social democracy in Sweden, the Myrdals also contributed to an understanding of the race problem in America, provided a reconceptualization of economic development in post-colonial Asia, examined the place of values in social science, and offered a critical revaluation of the character of and possible solutions to such public problems as housing, population decline, family formations, and long-term poverty. It can be said without exaggeration that no other social science-oriented public intellectuals have had a greater 1 Stanford
M. Lyman, Robert J. Morrow Eminent Scholar in Social Science at Florida Atlantic University, College of Arts and Letters, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton, Florida 33431-0991. 2 Sven Eliæson, Docent in Political Science at Stockholm University. 439 ° C
2001 Human Sciences Press, Inc.
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impact on issues that are still extant,—and now more likely to be treated under the rubric “globalization,”—than the Myrdals. In 1974, Gunnar Myrdal was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics; in 1982, Alva Myrdal received the Nobel Peace Prize. As might be expected, the Myrdals’ theories, conceptualizations, methods of social research, value orientations, and modes of political participation have been grist for continuous debate and subjects of enormous controversy. Moreover, each of the Myrdals engaged in life-long self-criticism, publishing or planning to publish, revisions, critiques and alternative approaches to their own original theses and policy proposals. Thus, Gunnar Myrdal, attacked by both white supremacists on the one hand and radical Marxists on the other, reconsidered the argument of his An American Dilemma many times during the more than forty years since its first publication, modifying certain of its hypotheses, suggesting different ways to resolve America’s race problem, and, shortly before his death, was forced by deteriorating eyesight to cease the correcting of the manuscript of an entirely rewritten version of what had been acknowledged in 1944 as a defining statement on the topic. Alva Myrdal’s Nation and Family is not only an examination of sociocultural and demographic effects on nation building, but that work also serves as a critique of Swedish social policies to which she had earlier contributed both concepts and proposals. In the great debate—that some would consider a scandal—over sterilization policies undertaken for more than four decades under the guidance of Sweden’s welfare state and social democracy, both Alva and Gunnar Myrdal were criticized harshly for their roles in promoting a practice said by their critics to be comparable to programs undertaken during Germany’s Nazi regime. In addition, given the Myrdals’ lifelong concerns for both civic and family life, their own child-rearing practices and modes of parenting have been the subject of bitter recriminations as well as controversies that touch on the re-examination of ethics in welfare-oriented democracies and inspire investigations that seek to sort out the relationship between the personal, the academic, and the political. Two of the essays in this symposium throw new light and provide hitherto unexamined materials on Gunnar Myrdal’s psychosocial perspective at the time he directed the research team working on the report that would be finalized in 1944 with Harper and Brothers’ publication of An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. Erik Berggren investigates the conception of self that is to be found in as well as adumbrating the major thesis of Myrdal’s text, pointing out what he wishes to designate as “Myrdal’s Freudian liberalism,”—a synthesis combining the “American Creed” with a psychoanalytic perspective on racism. Professor Berggren unpacks certain unappealing latent elements of this form of liberalism but concludes, nevertheless, that such an understanding of Myrdal’s argument is
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Symposium Editors’ Introduction
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useful: it “indicates the difficulties of avoiding ‘dangers’ if one seeks a social analysis which is not politically sterile.” Clare L. Spark, who has been able to see some of the letters and papers housed in the Ralph Bunche archives, discloses and analyzes the debate that accompanied the latter’s service as one of Myrdal’s principal research associates on the American Dilemma project. Critically appraising the popular idea that Bunche played the role of “vulgar Marxist” to Myrdal’s “statist liberalism” and “utopian” moralizing, she uncovers the extent to which the latter represented himself as a “Burkean conservative” over against Bunche’s perspective that combined radical puritan libertarian traditionalism with social democratic and working-class orientations. Ultimately, she suggests, their differences constitute a special variant of the debate over race, caste, and class approaches to America’s as yet unresolved dilemma. The consequences of American social science perspectives for the Swedish model of school reform are examined by E. Stina Lyon. When, in 1950, the Swedish parliament undertook experimentation on the nation’s public school system, revamping its curriculum to introduce a core of courses devoted to the responsibilities and obligations of citizenship, the new legislation moved in a direction charted earlier by the report of the 1946 School Commission and based on ideas developed in the 1930s by Gunnar and Alva Myrdal. Professor Lyon describes and critically analyzes four dilemmas of modernity to the solution of which the new modes of education as well as innovative techniques of social research were said to contribute. In all of these, American social scientific practices and conceptualizations, brought to Sweden by the Myrdals after their visits to the USA, were significant. The author concludes that these approaches are of value in considering school reforms appropriate to the globalized curricula of twenty-first century institutions of education. Hedwig Ekerwald appraises the issues involved in recent debates over Sweden’s sterilization policy. She not only presents the several contentious questions that marked (and, perhaps, marred) this debate, including summaries of journalistic, social scientific and ethical points of view, but also provides an epistemological perspective on the matter, introducing the concept of “chronocentrism” as central to characterizing major elements of the criticisms of the Myrdals’ role in this program. Martin Bulmer describes the structure of the Myrdal family using autobiographical writings of its members to explore how the constellation of family relationships may be related to Alva’s and Gunnar’s ideas.
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