This article argues that Thomas More's creative appropriation in Utopia (1516) of the New World narrative enabled him to sketch out a cosmopolitan civil science for the purpose of sparking sentiments for a new ethics. Placing More's classic in a wider and more detailed context the article shows that the book's protagonists' anthropological approach to civil scientific study in turn has three important characteristics, all of which set it apart from conventional social knowledge: it is (1) empirical or experiential, (2) (...) comparative and (3) cosmopolitan. The article thus offers a new interpretation of the relationship between Utopia and the New World as one that stresses the value of social experimentation, an aspect that is elaborated by emphasizing the theme of social knowledge both in the many vernacular European editions of the work as well as in the account of Utopian social life. (shrink)

SummaryTracing the international career of the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights to Sweden via France, this article is a study in the translation of politics and the politics of translation. Specifically, it shows how the Swedish translator, physician and publisher Lorents Münter Philipson reached for it in 1792 to add to domestic arguments against hereditary office, the purpose of which, the article argues, was to revive and legitimise a more indigenous but by now slumbering rights revolution. The article first outlines (...) the reception of America in Sweden and the ways in which Sweden figured in American debates. It then provides a detailed analysis of the trial that ensued as a response to the Swedish translation of the Virginia Declaration. Having reconstructed the process of transmission and the trial, during which the translator was charged with attacking Sweden's monarchical constitution by means of ‘wrongly’ translating the term ‘magistrate’, the article places the translation of the declaration in political context. The contextual analysis shows that translating the declaration at this particular point in time makes most sense against the background of the events unfolding in revolutionary France, which the translator hoped would influence political developments in Sweden and which the authorities sought to suppress. (shrink)

This article recovers and analyses some of the ways in which 'society' in the latter half of the eighteenth century was re-described by Swedish political writers attempting to reform current ways of organizing social and political space. The article shows how a radical language of politics contributed to the formation of a new collective identity for commoners. By concentrating on changing social descriptions -- specifically the challenges that were posed to conventional ways of understanding and representing society -- two relationships (...) of central importance to understanding the emergence of modern political thought and social organization are analysed: firstly, the relationship between political rhetoric in the construction of new collective identities and, secondly, the relationship between political struggle and the media, or public sphere. Moreover, the article contributes to a history of early European radical political thought, focusing on ideological developments that took place before the French Revolution and on the so- called margins of Europe. (shrink)