From Survival Mode to Utopian Dreams: Conceptions of Society, Social Planning, and Historical Time in 1950s and 1960s Finland

In this chapter, I examine conceptions of social planning, the role and interrelations of social and economic policy, and the part played by the empirical social sciences in public policy. I illustrate experiences of society by looking at ideational discourses in the Finnish Social Policy Association during the 1950s and 1960s, distinguishing three distinct societal conceptions that range from conservative policies and aversion to state intervention to societal utopias spurred by planning optimism. I contextualize and analyze them as three “historical presents,” each with its specific situational relationships to the past and the future. These notions of historical time were crucial elements in how society and its future were perceived.