The Swedish Paradox
By: Julian Baggini
Tags: Philosophy, Sweden, Paradoxes, Pandemic, Freedom

Stockholm (cc) Michelle Maria

How can one of the biggest nanny states in the world also be one of the most permissive?

The global pandemic has put Sweden in the spotlight, and what has been illuminated might comes as a surprise. The country’s has a reputation for state paternalism, with high levels of taxation and social security. To American eyes, it looks like socialism. And yet uniquely among European nations, its citizens have been given a lot of freedom during the coronavirus pandemic. There have been no harsh lockdowns and news reports have shown Swedes sharing beers in bars and on terraces. One of the biggest nanny states in the world has also been one of the most permissive.

This is what Maria Rankka, when CEO of the think tank Timbro, identified as the Swedish Paradox: a combination of paternalism and freedom, high taxation and a free market economy. It’s not entirely unique: the other Nordic nations have similar characteristics. But in Sweden the strange cocktail reaches its apogee.

Independence from the state leaves Americans more dependent on other people.

Rankka’s resolution of the paradox is that it is precisely the fact that Swedes can rely on the state for their security that they can be so independent. Compare this to the United States. In many ways this is the land of the free, in that the state tends to take a back seat and people are expected to rely on themselves. But that results in high levels of insecurity, leading people to rely much more on friends, family and community. Independence from the state leaves them more dependent on other people.

This analysis questions the very meaning of freedom and how we achieve it. It is generally assumed that there are trade-offs between freedom and security. In a completely laissez-faire state, people can do whatever they like but they get no support in doing so and no help if things go wrong. In a communist state, people can choose very little for themeless but they will always have an income, housing, health care, education and many other goods, including, in Soviet Russia, your ticket allocation at the Bolshoi ballet.

Isaiah Berlin famously complicated this picture, arguing that this kind of trade-off only concerns negative freedom, or freedom from interference. Positive freedom — the freedom to be able to do what you want — can be enhanced when negative freedom is limited. So the trade-off need not be between freedom and security but two kinds of freedom.

The Swedish Paradox shows that even this analysis isn’t fine-grained enough. Positive and negative freedom are not homogeneous masses, increased or decreased as a whole. We don’t have freedom but innumerable freedoms. A smart state can organise things to give us as much as it can of these, positive and negative.

We don’t have freedom but innumerable freedoms.

Sweden’s enabling social democracy certainly does restrict some negative freedoms through its high taxation and regulation. But this in turn enables some greater positive and negative freedoms. Healthcare, education and social security give people the positive freedom to fulfil their potentials. But the state also stays out of many areas of life, such as how people behave in a pandemic, and so it scores surprisingly well on negative freedom too.

There only seems to be a paradox if we assume that freedom comes as a singular package. This would make the coexistence of extremes of freedom and constraints impossible. But freedom actually comes in myriad specific forms and it is possible to engineer a state in which a few key ones are seriously restricted to maximise our capacity to enjoy many more. Freedom loving peoples of the world, take note: those “socialist” Swedes may be among the freest people on the planet.

This article is part of a series on Modern Paradoxes

Julian Baggini is a writer and philosopher. His latest book is The Godless Gospel: Was Jesus a Great Moral Teacher? (Affiliate link)