Culture and rationality

To be Norwegian implies organizing one's self-understanding in relation to a general set of concepts. Those concepts are profoundly European. This is true not only because Norway is connected to the political and geographical unity that happens to be called Europe, not only because Norwegians show constantly more signs of being involved in a general continentalization, not even because one or another European cultural heritage might contribute to the development of the Norwegian culture. What is unavoidably European about the Norwegian is the nature of its concept. This book plots the contours of this conceptual foundation across a broad range of discourses: history, politics, economics, law and linguistics. The guiding principle of these essays is that the cultural particularity of the Norwegian is only understandable through an appeal to the generality of the European intellectual frameworks that provide its legitimacy.