Artikkelen undersøker hvordan Jens Arup Seip (1905–1992) etablerte en ny forståelse av det nittende århundrets norske historie i
lys av det tjuende århundrets erfaringer. Ved å dekonstruere en virksom historiografisk «venstretradisjon» med røtter tilbake til
Sars, åpnet Seip for å rekonstruere perioden fra det han selv definerte som et genuint moderne erkjennelsesstandpunkt. Seips
«modernisering» av 1800-tallet ble imidlertid temperert av hans sterke metodiske krav om å innforlive seg med fortiden. Artikkelen
undersøker nærmere vekselspillet mellom Seips fortolkning av 1800-tallets historie, hans formative historiske erfaringer og
forståelse av sin egen tid. En sentral konklusjon går ut på at nøkkelen til Seips historiske tenkning må søkes i hans erfaringer med
mellomkrigstidens kaotiske «flerpartistat». I hans treleddede konstruksjon av moderne norsk historie utgjorde flerpartistaten «den
andre» som både embetsmannsstaten og ettpartistaten trådte frem i relieff mot.
A Modernist crosses his Tracks: Jens Arup Seip’s Nineteenth Century
The article investigates Jens Arup Seip’s (1905–1992) reinterpretation of Norway’s political history in the nineteenth century.
Emphasizing the radical contingency of history as well as Norway’s lack of natural geographical and cultural unity as a nation, Seip
juxtaposed his modernist notion of politics to a strongly Whiggish historiographical tradition. Whereas older historians such as
Ernst Sars (1835–1917) and Halvdan Koht (1873–1965) had seen politics essentially as a medium of national self-realization and
social integration, Seip saw it as efforts of human actors to impose their will on the course of history – which in and of itself
had no logical direction or metaphysical meaning. This distinctively Weberian understanding of politics underpinned Seip’s most
important scholarly contribution, his theory of the nineteenth-century Norwegian embetsmannsstat
(Beamtenstaat). A very exclusive group of high state officials, which spread thinly across the national
territory, governed Norway for seventy years – not as a «ruling class» in the Marxist sense, but rather as the country’s
political class in a Weberian sense. With its combination of «piecemeal social engineering» and strict
political control from above, this regime appeared in Seip’s portrait in a sense as a predecessor to the postwar, social-democratic
welfare state. The author argues, however, that the most important key to Seip’s contribution to Norwegian historiography is to be
found in the unstable and precarious inter-war period, when the combination of intellectual disillusionment and an almost desperate
search for order led to a series of re-evaluations of nineteenth-century traditions in political and social theory. These
experiences during Seip’s formative years as a student and young scholar led him to appreciate the historians’ and the politicians’
vocations as separate, yet in some ways strikingly similar, quests to forge order out of the confusing
contingency of human life.
