Patriotism and reform in nordic universities during the long eighteenth century

Abstract

Only a few studies have dealt in depth with how, let alone why, Nordic academia and its learned cosmopolitan legacy were challenged and transformed as a consequence of the political claims of the patria. While studies of eighteenth-century learning have mainly pinpointed the role of enlightenment movements and ideas in the downfall of the early modern Republic of Letters, this study asserts the importance of universities by demonstrating that these centuries-old institutions were both the main carriers of ideas of learned cosmopolitanism and eventually also the main critics of this ethos. The work explores how new governmental reforms and growing patriotic sentiments consolidated the state and university in new shared endeavours of 'utility for the fatherland', and how this development gradually replaced the centuries-old European academic cohesion with a system of competing national academic entities. In doing so, this work adds to our understanding of the learned world in the Nordic region and its relation to concurrent societal and political developments in the long eighteenth century. The book complements the new and more dynamic approaches to the history of universities by combining prosopographical methods, quantitative analysis and geo-visualisations with institutional and socio-cultural source material from various universities. The work takes a comparative and 'democratic' approach, as it also deals with the less well-known members of the Nordic learned elite, with several universities in different political and cultural settings.