Kampen om vetenskapen : Politisk och vetenskaplig formering under den svenska vänsterradikaliseringens era

Sammanfattning: This thesis examines the relation between politics and science in Sweden during the era of political radicalization in the sixties and seventies. Rooted in the Bourdieuan tradition of cultural sociology the main analysis focuses on relations between different cultural fields. Studying social movements and the political debate as well as the scientific fields makes it possible to identify habitus and strategies that formed the radical student generation. In addition to efforts to understand the historical background of the radicalisation, like the changes within the Education system and the general tendencies of the political debate, certain parts of the Swedish student movement are studied in-depth, like Unga filosofer in Stockholm and other autonomous groups organizing students and young teachers at the university departments. Of particular interest are the collective struggles to gain influence within the academic structures and the alternative forms of education that were initiated in the late sixties and early seventies.Since the young generation of radical academics were not prone to follow the traditional paths – the established order of succession – they had to find ways to compensate for the academic capital that they renounced by challenging their professors or other influential actors. To understand how this came to effect the Social Sciences and Humanities – or in this case more precisely the fields of philosophy, sociology and literary criticism – the other studies focus on analysing three politically motivated projects that were formed at intersections between a movement-context and academia: the first centred on the critique of positivism, the second engaged in the development of the ideas of scientific socialism – inspired by the reception of the philosophy of Louis Althusser – and the third a later feminist project that evolved in the field of literary criticism with the reception of Julia Kristeva’s theories. One thing the three projects had in common was that they created opportunities to channel political engagement in academic strategies by occupying homological positions in the political-intellectual field and the scientific fields – in some cases confronting the same antagonists in the different arenas. Some of the preconditions that made these strategies possible, which are discussed on the basis of the studies of the different fields, are the intellectual infrastructure that enabled conversion of symbolical assets, like magazines and other arenas for theoretical debate, the creation of social networks and the fact that the political radicalization encouraged transnational theoretical investments.