Bio: (1941-) Swedish sociologist. Göran Therborn studied at Lund University and taught at the University of Gothenburg and Cambridge. Therborn deals with the problems of class, inequality, unemployment, ideology, Marxism, radical theory, and the family.

            Feudalism and Capitalism

In his book Science, Class & Society (1976), he shows how the emergence of the science of economy, bourgeois sociology, and historical materialism is inextricably linked to the development of capitalism. Therborn bases his approach on classical historical materialism, but also on Althusser's cultural Marxism, and uses his epistemological approach and understanding of science. Therborn opposes sociological explanations based on individual psychology, and the classical economy does just that because it takes free and rational human action as its starting point. He sees the emergence of bourgeois sociology as a consequence of French and other bourgeois revolutions. Those revolutions arose as a consequence of problems and conflicts caused by industrialization and the associated rise of the capitalist class because the new capitalist class clashed with the outmoded political structures of the aristocracy.

The intellectual sources of bourgeois sociology are the theory of evolutionary determinism, the theory of elitist voluntarism, and the critique of the previous political economy. The main disadvantage of classical sociology is that it has not made an analytical distinction between society, on the one hand, and man and the state, on the other. Sociologists such as Durkheim and Max Weber suffered from petty-bourgeois intellectual narrowness and were therefore loyal to capitalism. On the other hand, historical materialism emerged as a scientifically based struggle against the capitalist world. It begins with the publication of the first joint works of Marx and Engels and the book German Ideology (1845), which represents an intellectual encounter between left-Hegelian philosophy, and the idea of ​​the radicalized intelligentsia and the working class. Marx and Engels used the material reality of the real world and the workers' struggle to build a systematic theory of society. That is how they came to the scientific theory of history and the revolutionary strategy based on it.

In his book What Does the Ruling Class do When it Rules?: State Apparatuses and State Power under Feudalism, Capitalism and Socialism  (1978), Therborn uses the categories of systems analysis to give a Marxist understanding of state power and the state apparatus. In the process, he constructed a systematic typology of differences between the feudal, capitalist, and socialist states. In the last parts of the book, he studies the history of the strategies that the workers' parties implemented in order to achieve socialism. In analyzing the strategies that the ruling class pursues in capitalism in order to rule, he concluded that the ruling class uses mostly state apparatus and economic exploitation and domination as ruling strategies, rather than ideology. His next book, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (1980) represents a further development of the ideas of the previous one, and in it, much more attention is paid to the issue of ideology. Therborn understands ideology very broadly, viewing it as an unconscious psychodynamic process that shapes consciousness and gives meaning to individuals and social groups through the symbolic order of language codes.

                                  Class in the 21st Century

In the article "Class in the 21st Century" (2012), Therborn studies the history and future of classes and class struggle. He believes that in the first eighty years of the twentieth century, workers were a force that the state and the ruling class had to take into account, either by making concessions to or by strict control over it. The set of processes led to the breakdown of working-class power: liberalization of capital flows, credit expansion, digital trading and accumulation of capital in pension and insurance funds, and global commodity chains - all this led to an enormous concentration of private capital. Instead of nationalization and regulation, the state began to pursue a policy of privatization and liberalization.

Economic differences between countries were greatest at the end of the twentieth century and then began to narrow. That is when the extremely accelerated class stratification began, both in the rich countries and in those countries that were becoming moderately developed (China and India). There is still no organized working class in developing countries (China, India, Russia, Indonesia, Nigeria, and South Africa). The situation is somewhat better in Latin American countries, where workers' parties have their own presidents. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there were completely new relations between class and nation, mobilization, identity, and ideology. Economic, gender, and ethnic inequalities remained the same in the twenty-first century as they were in the twentieth century. The ideological and political unification of the middle class with the ordinary masses would make the possibility of forming a class struggle against oligarchic capitalism achievable.

                               Family in the Twentieth Century

Therborn is also the author of a very extensive book on the global history of the family in the twentieth century - Between Sex and Power (2004). He singles out five main types of family systems in the world and connects them with the dominant religious traditions: African (animistic), European / North American (Christian), East Asian (Confucian), South Asian (Hindu), and Middle Eastern (Islamic) ). Variations of the three structural elements are key to understanding the differences between these systems. Those three structural elements are: male dominance/patriarchy; marriage as a means of regulating sexual behavior; and demographic patterns (which depend mostly on fertility rates and contraceptive use).

The decline of patriarchal power was mostly influenced by the First World War when women became a labor force to help the war effort, and the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, which produced a second wave of feminism. He believes that these five different family systems still remain distant. However, it is possible to observe some world trends: declining global fertility rates, improvement of the economic situation of women, the declining importance of tribal kinship systems, expanding freedom of choice of marital partners, increasing women's rights in marriage and family, increasing sexual freedoms, increasing acceptance of same-sex unions, increasing rights of children. Therborn also studied other topics: the history of European societies, unemployment, the welfare state, inequalities in the world, globalization, and world cities.

Main works

Science, Class & Society (1976);

What Does the Ruling Class do When it Rules?: State Apparatuses and State Power under Feudalism, Capitalism and Socialism (1978);

The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (1980);

Why Some Peoples are More Unemployed than Others (1986);

European Modernity and Beyond: The Trajectory of European Societies: 1945-2000 (1995);

From a Doll’s House to the Welfare State (1997);

Between Sex and Power: Family in the World, 1900-2000 (2004);

Inequalities of the World ( 2006);

Asia and Europe in Globalization ( 2006);

From Marxism to Post-Marxism? (2008);

Handbook of European Societies: Social Transformations in the 21st Century (2010);

The World: A Beginner’s Guide (2011);

African Capital Cities: Power and Powerlessness (2011);

„Class in the 21st Century“, in New Left Review (2012);

The Killing Fields of Inequality (2013);

Cities of Power (2017).