Alva and Gunnar Myrdal were among the leading social engineers of the 20th century. In Sweden in the 1930s and 1940s, they worked in close interaction with the ruling social democracy on the development of the welfare state (folkhem), which can be described as a "normalisation society" in Foucault's sense. In the planned project, I want to examine the Myrdals' social utopia in terms of style of thought, life practice and gender in order to find out whether their intellectual designs and lifestyle, which aimed at a fundamental reform of society and the "liberation of women", actually achieved this goal, or to what extent they reproduced existing social conditions unrecognised and in fact sanctioned them through a "revolutionary" social design. The methodological approach will concentrate on analysing a multiply crossed image production: The images that the Myrdals produced of society, of themselves, the images that society produced of itself and of the Myrdals. This complex of interwoven images constituted the Myrdals as specific subjects and a marriage community, it generated the need for socio-political action and at the same time created the legitimisation to intervene, sometimes massively, in the lives of individuals. In this way, the connection between self-control and the normalisation of society as well as the habitus and intellectual work of individuals will come into view.

The project was funded by the Thyssen Foundation and the DFG.

Publications:

• Etzemüller, Thomas: The Romanticism of the Drawing Board. Social engineering and the democratic community in Sweden: The example of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal (1930-1960), in: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 32, 2006, pp. 445-466
  
• Etzemüller, Thomas: "Our bad world". The moral power of rationality in Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, in: Knoch, Habbo (ed.): Bürgersinn mit Weltgefühl. Political morality and solidary protest in the sixties and seventies, Göttingen 2007, pp. 74-92
  
• Etzemüller, Thomas: "Swedish Modern". Alva and Gunnar Myrdal sketch a normalisation society, in: Mittelweg 36 18, 2009, H. 6, pp. 49-63
  
• Etzemüller, Thomas: The Romanticism of Rationality. Alva & Gunnar Myrdal - Social Engineering in Sweden, Bielefeld 2010 (English translation: Alva and Gunnar Myrdal: Social Engineering in the Modern World, Lanham/MD et al. 2014 [Paperback 2016])
  
• Etzemüller, Thomas: Tilt images: The narrative-visual image programme of an "American" intellectual couple, in: Vogel, Christian/Nökel, Sonja E. (eds.): Gesichter der Wissenschaft. Representation and performance of scholars in portraits, Göttingen 2019, pp. 133-144