Tracing the international career of the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights to Sweden via France, this article is a study in the translation of politics and the politics of translation. Specifically, it shows how the Swedish translator, physician and publisher Lorents Münter Philipson (1765–1851) reached for it in 1792 to add to domestic arguments against hereditary office, the purpose of which, the article argues, was to revive and legitimise a more indigenous but by now slumbering rights revolution. The article first outlines the reception of America in Sweden and the ways in which Sweden figured in American debates. It then provides a detailed analysis of the trial that ensued as a response to the Swedish translation of the Virginia Declaration. Having reconstructed the process of transmission and the trial, during which the translator was charged with attacking Sweden's monarchical constitution by means of ‘wrongly’ translating the term ‘magistrate’, the article places the translation of the declaration in political context. The contextual analysis shows that translating the declaration at this particular point in time makes most sense against the background of the events unfolding in revolutionary France, which the translator hoped would influence political developments in Sweden and which the authorities sought to suppress.

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze how historians and other writers in eighteenth-century Sweden conceived of the social benefits of history writing within the context of what they considered a modern(izing) enlightened polity. In the 1740s and 1750s the benefits of history were discussed in the context of an ongoing enlightenment discourse on society that stipulated a close relationship between knowledge about the past and values like civility, virtue and patriotism. Virtually all of the speeches that are analyzed in this article refer to how historical reflection is a social practice that creates civic bonds between individuals and groups, bonds that constitute the premises for the creation and prosperity of a modern civil society and for a collective identity based on civic, as opposed to religious, foundations. The first two sections of the chapter recreate some aspects of the discourse on society in Sweden around the middle of the century by considering contemporary notions of enlightenment and civil society respectively. The third section shows in more detail how contemporaries argued that moral education was the most powerful instrument to create a community based on fellowship rather than force. A fourth section specifically analyzes texts that articulated the notion of history as a teacher of modern sociability, which is then specified in a final section that considers contemporary ideas about the advantages of visual and written historical media – statues and biographies respectively – to engage broader segments of society in the civilizing project.

This article argues that Thomas More's creative appropriation in Utopia (1516) of the New World narrative enabled him to sketch out a cosmopolitan civil science for the purpose of sparking sentiments for a new ethics. Placing More's classic in a wider and more detailed context the article shows that the book's protagonists' anthropological approach to civil scientific study in turn has three important characteristics, all of which set it apart from conventional social knowledge: it is (1) empirical or experiential, (2) comparative and (3) cosmopolitan. The article thus offers a new interpretation of the relationship between Utopia and the New World as one that stresses the value of social experimentation, an aspect that is elaborated by emphasizing the theme of social knowledge both in the many vernacular European editions of the work as well as in the account of Utopian social life.