Niklas Olsen is Professor of the History of Political Thought at the SAXO-Institute, at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His academic interests address European history in the twentieth century, exploring how political languages and practices are constructed and disseminated in various national and transnational settings. Among his publication are The Sovereign Consumer: A New Intellectual History ofNeoliberalism (2018) and History in the Plural: An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck (2012). He has moreover edited volumes about themes such as the memory of ‘68’ in Denmark, twentieth century German intellectuals, the challenge posed to Danish Universities by National Socialism in the 1930s and 1940s, critical theories of crisis in Europe and Scandinavian knowledge societies.
He is currently in charge of the research project “Key Actors – Peopling the Neoliberal Economy”, which is funded by the Danish Independent Research Fund and runs from September 2019 until September 2021. The hypothesis of the project is that the endurance of the neoliberal economy can be understood only by exploring the ways in which certain imaginary characters, what we label “key actors” (such as the entrepreneur, the investor and the consumer), have been articulated, disseminated and applied as sources of economic knowledge and role models of societal behavior. In other words, we will show how the neoliberal order is peopled, and sustained, by these neglected key actors. The project focuses on the Anglo-American context in the period after 1970, which saw the earliest and most significant attempts to articulate and put the key actors into practice, serving as sources of inspiration for governments and institutions throughout the Western world.
Key Publications:
Andersson, Jenny and Niklas Olsen (2023). ”Introduction: libertarianism in the Nordics since the 1980s” Introduction to special issue, “Nordic Libertarians” in Journal of Political Ideologies.
Vestermark Køber, Jesper & Niklas Olsen (2023), “Privatizing the Welfare State: Danish Libertarianism from the 1980s to the 2000s”, in special issue in Journal of Political Ideologies edited by Jenny Andersson and Niklas Olsen, DOI: 10.1080/13569317.2023.2249646.
A pre-print of the article can be found here!
Olsen, Niklas & Jensen, Jacob (2022). “Jørn Henrik Petersen and the Origins of the Third Way: The Market Turn in the Danish Welfare State since the 1970s”, Scandinavian Journal of History, 2022, vol. 47, no. 2, 203–224, https://doi.org/10.1080/03468755.2021.1989326 (OA).
Olsen, Niklas (2022), “Klimapolitikkens idéhistorie i Danmark 1980–2022, Historisk Tidsskrift, 122 (1), 182–202, https://tidsskrift.dk/historisktidsskrift/article/view/132932/178066 (OA).
Niklas Olsen, 2020, Ludwig von Mises, the Idea of Consumer Democracy and the Origins of Neoliberalism, The Tocqueville Review, 41 (2), 43-64.
Niklas Olsen and Daniel Zamora, 2019, How Decades of Neoliberalism Led to the Era of Right Wing Populism, the Jacobin.
Niklas Olsen (interviewed by Daniel Zamora), 2019, How Neoliberalism Invented Democracy, the Jacobin.
Niklas Olsen, 2018, The Sovereign Consumer: A New Intellectual History of Neoliberalism, Palgrave Macmillan.
Niklas Olsen, 2017, From Choice to Welfare: The Concept of the Consumer in the Chicago School, Modern Intellectual History, 14 (2), 507-535
Niklas Olsen, 2016, Velfærdsstatens krise og neoliberalismens indtog i Danmark i 1970erne, Slagmark: Tidsskrift for Idéhistorie, 74, 119-138.
Niklas Olsen, Welfare State Criticism in 1970s Denmark, in David Heidenblad Larsson, Niklas Olsen, Johan Östling (eds.), Histories of Knowledge in Postwar Scandinavia (forthcoming).
Jacob Jensen & Niklas Olsen, eds., 2016, “Theme Issue: Neoliberalism”, Slagmark: Tidsskrift for Idéhistorie.
Niklas Olsen, 2014, A Second-Hand Dealer in Ideas: Christian Gandil and Scandinavian Configurations of European Neoliberalism, 1945-1970, in Hagen Schulz-Forberg & Niklas Olsen, eds., Re-Inventing Western Civilisation: Transnational Reconstructions of Liberalism in Europe in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 137-167.
Hagen Schulz-Forberg & Niklas Olsen, eds., 2014, Re-Inventing Western Civilisation: Transnational Reconstructions of Liberalism in Europe in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Jeppe Nevers & Niklas Olsen, 2015, Liberalism and the Welfare State: The Danish Case in a European Perspective, in Anselm Doering-Manteuffel & Jörn Leonhard, eds., Liberalism in the Twentieth Century, Franz Steiner Verlag, 239-270.
Jeppe Nevers, Niklas Olsen & Casper Sylvest, eds., 2013, Dansk liberalisme i internationalt perspektiv, Syddansk Universitetsforlag.
Niklas Olsen, 2013, Liberalismens revitalisering og afkulturalisering i Danmark, 1945-1970, in Jeppe Nevers, Niklas Olsen & Casper Sylvest, eds., Dansk liberalisme i internationalt perspektiv, Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 221-246.
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