Swedish Population Thought in the Eighteenth Century.

The article focuses on the Swedish population thought in the eighteenth century. Eighteenth-century Sweden is best known to demographers for the establishment at mid-century of the first of the modern series of official population data. The period also has some particular interest for the history of population thought because of the position of Sweden, a peripheral nation somewhat outside the main currents of European development at the time, where the older way life continued and where the cultural revolution of agricultural change and industrialization came relatively late. In eighteenth-century Swedish population thought there lingered some remnants of the older and harsher conception that the individual exists for the good of the state, that the means of subsistence are rigidly limited, that the state or community is entitled to restrict individual liberty, as in marriage and land-holding, and that the public good is advanced by poverty of the workers. More prominent in Swedish population thought at this time, however, were the newer cameralist and mercantilist ideas. It was a period of active intellectual and business contacts abroad. It had long been royal policy to bring distinguished foreigners to the court and to the universities. One gets an impression of considerable internationalism in the aristocracy and the upper classes.