The Masses and the Elite: the Conception of Social Inequality in 1840s Scandinavian Literature

Abstract

The opposition between the masses and the elite is the constituting formula by which the classic texts of elite theory justified social inequality around 1900. Nowadays, contemporary theorists of social inequality interpret this opposition primarily as a panic reaction to demographic developments that occurred towards the end of the 19th century. Uncovering the same mechanisms in fiction from that period is an obvious task for literary scholars. In the present article, however, it will be argued that the ‘true’ contemporaries of elite theories are already manifest in texts from around 1840 – texts that are usually regarded as belonging to the Romantic period. The argument is based on Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s essay ‘Folk og Publikum’ [The People and the Audience] and the drama ‘Den indiske Cholear’ (1835) [The Indian Cholera] by Henrik Wergeland. Heiberg’s and Wergeland’s texts will not be read as anachronistic reflections of 1900 elite theories, but rather as complex analyses of precisely those bourgeois concerns that led to the emergence of the elite theories toward the end of the century.