Retfærd 

Abstract: The aim of the article is to discuss the role of the national Ombudsman institution, using the Ombudsman for Children (BO) in Sweden as the example of an existing institution and the Ombudsman for the Elderly as an example of a possible future Ombudsman. Taking the human condition of vulnerability as a point of departure, in accordance with Martha Albertson Fineman’s vulnerability approach, the issue is whether the Ombudsman can be a useful tool for the state to provide resilience towards the inevitable age-related and situation-based dependencies in later life. In the article it is discussed whether it is reasonable to argue for an expansion of the Ombudsman office to elderly persons. The article also raises the issue of whether the duties of such an office should be at a general level to promote the rights of the elderly according to law, or focus on individual cases.

Abstract: This article aims to contribute to the history of biopolitical thought through a more accurate understanding of the Swedish professor of political science Rudolf Kjellen considered both in his historical and political context. Kjellen coined the term ‘biopolitics’, as early as 1905, in a two-volume work entitled The Great Powers, and developed it even further in a 1916 book entitled The State as a Form of Life. Because of the organicist analogies deployed by Kjellen, his biopolitical theory of the state is considered as a form of ‘vitalism’ or ‘organicism’ in the contemporary literature on biopolitics. Based on a close examination of texts only available in Swedish (and, to some extent, German) I argue that this fails to account for Kjellen’s argument for a strong state and his analysis of the rationality of state action in a multiplicity of areas of state intervention, including the guarding, refining and securing of the population stock. This reading brings Kjellen’s concept of biopolitics significantly closer to the reality that the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault described, using the same concept, more than a half-century later. Kjellen’s writings also foreshadow subsequent developments of keen interest for biopolitical study in a Nordic context, particularly the rise of the social democratic welfare state and the social engineering of the population material, starting in the 1930s. (Less)