The Professor and the Body Politic : Pehr Kalm and the Social Imaginary in Eighteenth-Century Turku

This article investigates the representations of society in a number of mid-eighteenth-century dissertations supervised by Pehr Kalm (1716−1779), a disciple of Linnaeus and a well-known professor of economics in Turku (Åbo), against the background of the strong ties that tended to bind early modern literati to the ruling elites. The article consists of four thematic sections, which examine how the dissertations conceptualized the body politic, the powers that be, the populace and the scholars. All in all, Kalm and his students adhered to a fairly traditional social imaginary, although their renderings of their own caste, the men of learning, as indispensable for progress and the common good foreboded a later, expert-centric era