The Redistributive Ethos in Crisis: Three Imaginaries Dismantling the Welfare State
Scholar in Residence Lecture 2 | Hanna Kuusela, University of Jyväskylä
As far-right and anti-immigrant populism gains ground across liberal democracies, the critique of economic inequality has increasingly been displaced by boundary-drawing along ethnic and national lines. The second lecture examines this shift by tracing the rise of the “good domestic owner” as a key cultural figure legitimizing the new era of wealth accumulation in Finland. Analyzing the changing terms of debate in the Finnish parliament and business media since the deregulation of capital flows in the 1980s, the lecture demonstrates how systemic critique of capitalism has gradually given way to nationalistic and tribalist group logics that celebrate domestic ownership and capital. In this emerging imaginary, the domestic wealthy are symbolically admired and often granted policy advantages, while criticism is redirected toward foreign capital and global financial flows. The result is not the disappearance of critique, but its reorientation: Inequality becomes reframed through the lens of belonging rather than class.
The subtitles were generated with the help of automatic speech recognition software (AI) and may contain minor inaccuracies.
