Finnish freedom fighter, Anders Chydenius
Interesting article in today’s Helsingin Sanomat Int’l Ed. about the Mohammed cartoons and one of the father’s of freedom in Finland, Anders Chydenius…
The uproar over the cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad is, in the eyes of politics, an Eastern peculiarity, which requires special action. The problem with the West is, that once the opportunity is ripe, “cases” increasingly turn into “special cases”.
With their apologies concerning the cartoons, Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen and – as an opinion leader – President Tarja Halonen, call to mind self-censorship, in which Finland has had both a theoretical and practical grounding.
[...]Chydenius would certainly have been saddened by conditions in China.
What would Chydenius have thought about the Mohammed cartoon situation?
“- – free state, private ownership and individual freedom. Inhabitants could choose whatever profession, freedom of trade would be complete, there would be no privileges, regulation or taxes. Bureaucracy would be nonexistent, and the only officer would be a judge who would oversee that no-one’s rights would be supressed.”
Hey, even Tarja Halonen likes Anders Chydenius!
Tarja Halonen: Speech at the main celebration of the Anders Chydenius Jubilee Year (Kokkola, 1.3.2003).
The President of Finland, Tarja Halonen, points to the efficiency of a market economy combined with social justice as the underlying force behind our Nordic welfare society, and sees it as grounded in the fundamentally radical principles of freedom, equality and collective responsibility that were advocated at an early stage by Anders Chydenius.
(From http://www.chydenius.net)
Comment by Söderberg — Tue, Feb 21st, 2006 @ 11:50 pm
Chydenius was not living in a democratic state and in the “name” field it reads Söderberg. I’ll remove it because I’m not him/her …
Comment by Anonymous — Wed, Feb 22nd, 2006 @ 12:35 am
I’d loved to have had a lot off small blue pictures of Chydenius a few years back
Comment by Hank W. — Wed, Feb 22nd, 2006 @ 9:05 am
After reading about Chydenius some time ago, I couldn’t keep wondering how on earth we just sort of skipped him in history class. As far as I know he’s one of the greatest finns ever.
Comment by Topias — Wed, Feb 22nd, 2006 @ 9:08 am
and he wrote the big book national gain which impossed almost similiar ideas as adam smiths the wealth of nations which was published 11 years later
Comment by Blah — Wed, Feb 22nd, 2006 @ 10:19 am
But Chydenius wasn’t a Finn. At the time he lived the whole idea of a separate unity called “Finland” was just starting to take form and eastern Bothnia (or whatever Pohjanmaa is in English) hardly belonged even to that vague concept. After all, Finland and Suomi had meant for centuries just the part that now is called Finland proper (Varsinais-Suomi). Finland’s borders, later on in the 1800s, were determined by geographical and military realities not by ethnicity or language the people happened to speak. So, pretty much by accident this Swede, Chydenius, became “Finnish”.
Then again, in some sense it would be correct to call him a citizen of Sweden-Finland – or perhaps even more to the point: a subject of the king of Sweden. That would prevent Sweden from “stealing” the history of Finland, something they still, even in recent history books, tend to do.
Comment by Anonymous — Wed, Feb 22nd, 2006 @ 10:23 am
Anonymous: I don’t buy your argument about “this Swede, Chydenius”. He was a Swedish-speaking Osthrobothnian. His early childhood he spent in Sotkamo and Kuusamo. The whole Finnish nationalist rhetoric you’re using was invented in the 19th Century.
Your argument about Finland is bogus. After all, Finland proper is Southwestern Finland, nothing else. By your logic, we couldn’t use the concept of Finland to Karelians, Savonians and people of other provinces any more than we could to Swedish-speaking Osthrobothnians. In all these other provinces there was Swedish-speaking clergy exactly as in the ethnically Finnish municipality of Sotkamo where Chydenius was born. So you’d probably say any Swedish-speaker in any of these other provinces except for Finland proper would be “this Swede, not a Finn” while their Finnish-speaking neighbors would’ve been “Finns” to you, right?
And Finland proper has always had Swedish-speaking inhabitants historically referred to as Finns… What would you call 18th Century Swedish-speaking inhabitants of Turku, the capital of Finland at that time?
Comment by Helsinkian — Wed, Feb 22nd, 2006 @ 11:38 am
Chydenius of course studied in Turku, the capital of Finland. According to this Chydenius website, his graduate thesis was “a description of the usage and making of the bark canoes of the Indians of North America”:
http://sydaby.eget.net/swe/jp_chydenius.htm
Comment by Helsinkian — Wed, Feb 22nd, 2006 @ 11:47 am
Referring to #4, I wrote short essay on Chydenius in the student exams back in ‘88 but I remember there really was just few paragraphs on him in our history book, so I had to cook up pretty much on his connections to the enlightment and the age of reason.
One thing I still remember is that his sermons at church were not always religious, but he instructed his congregation how to increase potato crops and build better carriages.
Comment by antti (the redneck one) — Wed, Feb 22nd, 2006 @ 12:02 pm
Helsinkian, it’s a mess when one tries to bring historicial terms to our dicourse. Nevertheless, I simply said that Chydenius hardly could have called himself a Finn. That’s because there was at the time no clear idea that “Finn” could mean all kinds of people living in eastern Sweden. That idea began taking form slowly during the 18th century. Furthermore Swedish-speaking Osthrobothnia was (and still is) a special case.
Nowadays all Finns, even savolaiset, are Finns of course. If you want to project that reality to the past, go ahead, but that’s, actually, the nationalistic thing to do, not the historic view I was talking about.
“Finn”, by the way, apparently meant originally the Sami. “Suomi” (or suomalainen) meant the people in Finland proper since about 5000 years ago, theorizes Unto Salo.
Comment by Anonymous — Wed, Feb 22nd, 2006 @ 12:34 pm
Chydenius was Finn, as we now understand that word. However, in a sense he was also a Swede, and he has rightly been called the father of Swedish liberalism. Equally rightly he could be called the father of Finnish liberalism. He was both.
Which country should get the honor of him? Does Finland or Sweden still have some cultural or other characteristics that lead to the existence of such an extraordinary person? Yes, both do, though not that much. So everyone may call Chydenius a Finn but also a Swede and take credit of him to both countries (though not too much).
Comment by Me — Wed, Feb 22nd, 2006 @ 12:38 pm
And, by the way, Turku wasn’t Finland’s capital at the time. Finland’s capital was Stockholm.
Comment by Anonymous — Wed, Feb 22nd, 2006 @ 12:57 pm
Which country should get the honor of him? Does Finland or Sweden still have some cultural or other characteristics that lead to the existence of such an extraordinary person? Yes, both do, though not that much. So everyone may call Chydenius a Finn but also a Swede and take credit of him to both countries (though not too much).
I’m no Chydenius expert but I think he was a product of Osthrobothnia with it’s international tar trade suffering from mercantilism. Everybody there understood that their profits went to the pockets of the merchants in Stockholm. Chydenius found a way to channel this frustration in the “parliament” (valtiopäivät).
Comment by Anonymous — Wed, Feb 22nd, 2006 @ 1:07 pm
Then again, in some sense it would be correct to call him a citizen of Sweden-Finland
A country called “Sweden-Finland” never existed, not any more than the modern Sweden is referred to as “Sweden-Norrland” or “Sweden-SkÃ¥ne”. The whole idea of a “Sweden-Finland” was invented by nationalistic Finnish historians in the 1930s. Finland was a part of Sweden, and Chydenius likely called himself “finne” in the same sense somebody from Västergötland would have called himself “västgöte”.
Comment by Söderberg — Wed, Feb 22nd, 2006 @ 2:01 pm
Söderberg, if Scania was an independent state it would be polite to speak about Sverige-SkÃ¥ne when dealing with Scania’s history. That would be a reminder that this particular national state (Scania) had a history of its own, so to speak. Of course it would not be correct in a historical sense but and I know about the contoversy around the term. I was just referring to the tendency of Swedish historians to write history as if Finland was some kind of a Swedish colony.
As for Chydenius “most likely calling himself finne”, well, the term was in use at the time he lived, and indeed it could be used of a person from “Österland”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96sterland).
Then again, as I wrote, the idea of “finnar” as all kind of people living in what roughly is Finland today didn’t really mature until the latter part of the 18th century if even then.
Comment by Anonymous — Wed, Feb 22nd, 2006 @ 4:04 pm