The discipline Idé och lärdomshistoria, translated as History of Science and Ideas, is an important part of the humanities faculties in most Swedish universities, most notably Stockholm, Uppsala, Lund, Gothenburg, Umeå and Södertörn.
[1] These concern, respectively, the investigation of independent unit ideas, the social conditions of knowledge production, and the cultural-literary technologies and practices by which intellectual authority arises.
[4] After the events of the first world war, the supposed progressive direction of science was discredited, and its historical study lost interest.
Important figures within this revival were Eneström, Arrhenius, von Hofsten, Nordenskiöld, Oseen, and, most famously, Johan Nordström.
Influenced by figures ranging as widely as Dilthey, Burckhardt, Comte, Buckle, Tannery, and Sarton, Nordström argued for a new social historical understanding of the history of science.
What later became known as the Nordström school in Sweden was marked less by strict methodology than by a general sensitivity to social historical circumstances of scientific knowledge production.