REVIEW ESSAY The Swedish Exception? The Humanities in the Modern Welfare State Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen, Roskilde University, Denmark Hampus Östh Gustafsson, Folkhemmets styvbarn: Humanioras legitimitet i svensk kunskapspolitik 1935–1980. Göteborg: Daidalos, 2020. Pp. 494. 270 kr (cloth). Johan Östling, Anton Jansson, and Ragni Svensson Stringberg, Humanister i offentligheten: Kunskapens aktörer och arenor under efterkrigstiden. Göteborg: Makadam, 2022. Pp. 464. 275 kr (cloth). Also available as a PDF. https://doi.org/10 .22188/kriterium.36. Anders Ekström and Hampus Östh Gustafsson, eds., The Humanities and the Modern Politics of Knowledge: The Impact and Organization of the Humanities in Sweden, 1850–2020. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. Pp. 294. €117.00 (cloth). S weden has proven fertile ground for the history of scholarship. The country has a long tradition for idé- och lärdomshistoria (history of ideas and scholar- ship), with specialized departments at most Swedish universities, going back to the 1930s. In recent decades, these departments increasingly have oriented themselves toward the international intellectual history and history of science communities. In ad- dition, Swedish historians have now also embraced the history of knowledge, especially with the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge, and the history of humanities, of- ten with reference to this journal and the Society for the History of the Humanities. This has in the last couple of years resulted in several books that document the history of the humanities in Sweden in the twentieth century. A central question of these books is whether the history of the humanities in Sweden is different from that of other parts of Europe and the world. The question is raised in Hampus Östh Gustafsson’s book on Swedish research pol- icy. During the first half of the twentieth century, the humanities in Sweden expanded History of Humanities, volume 8, number 1, spring 2023. © 2023 Society for the History of the Humanities. All rights reserved. Published by The University of Chicago Press for the Society for the History of the Humanities. https://doi.org/10.1086/724100 143