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Article: Brave new world in Sweden? Roland Huntford's The New Totalitarians.(Critical essay)
- Article from:
- Scandinavian Studies
- Article date:
- June 22, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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DURING THE LATTER HALF of the twentieth century, Sweden's international image, especially in the so-called English-speaking world, was dominated to a great degree by impressions of its welfare state policies and the belief that it was a sexually libertine society. In British circles, especially those of the political Left, this was generally but by no means always the case until the 1960s as litanies of praise reverberated in numerous periodicals.
In 1971, however, Roland Huntford, the Stockholm correspondent of The Observer, issued a dissenting opinion in his book The New Totalitarians, a scathing indictment of the Swedish welfare state that interpreted it as ...