Hannes H. Gissurarson, Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Iceland, was one of the lecturers in a summer school for young conservatives in Sundbyholm Castle near Eskilstuna in Sweden on 18 June 2023. He posed two questions. The first was why conservatives should support the free market. The answer was that the free market was nothing but a venue for individuals to pursue their own goals, including the practices and traditions that conservatives wanted to protect and develop. Government on the other hand tends to undermine such practices and traditions. With its monopoly on force it was often a much more radical and dangerous factor of transformation than the market. Gissurarson pointed out that social units like the family and the nation were not totally fixed and immovable. Individuals were born into one family and established another one. People move between states If you are to love your country, it has to be lovely, to quote Edmund Burke. The Nation is a daily plebiscite, Ernest Renan said.
The second question was: Why should Nordic conservatives support classical liberalism? The answer was that liberty was their second nature, their identity. It was a tradition which had been developing for millennia. As early as 98 AD the Roman chronicler Tacitus had described how German tribes governed themselves. When Bishop Ansgar sought to christen Sweden in mid-ninth century, a king told him that he had to obtain the consent of his subject at their assemblies. Later in that same century, an emissary of the French king asked Rollo and his men who was the leader, and they replied that they were all equal. In Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla, the idea is expressed time and again that kings have to obey the same law as their subjects and that they could be deposed if they did not do so, as Torgny the Lawman said to the Swedish king in 1018. To this medieval tradition of legal certainty and an implicit social contract, Anders Chydenius added an argument for free trade, and Nikolaj F. S. Grundtvig an argument for free associations, such as private schools, independent congregations, spontaneous associations and collectives. This Nordic tradition of liberty had withstood the assaults both of absolutist kings in ancient times and of power-hungry social democrats in modern times.
