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This chapter describes the ideology of the strong society as a social democratic worldview, where economic and social advances drew on each other, and where the expansion of security was inextricably related to industrial expansion. Growth, under the control of democratic socialism, was identified as the primary means for social development and increased security, and as a means that would, in the near future, overcome the evils of capitalism and spread affluence to all groups in society. Security, on the other hand, was articulated as a precondition for a productive economy—the lubricant of the process of modernisation towards the advanced industrial economy. To this extent, the strong society was a coherent worldview, where economic expansion and individual security coexisted in utter harmony. Its commitment to progress in the form of a highly productive economy was based on this faith in a balanced development. This, then, was a notion of progress that saw change as a fundamentally unproblematic process. The role of politics within this framing was to steer change towards the fulfilment of individual and public good. However, the strong society was also an inherently economistic ideology, one in which social goals seemed to derive their meaning from the economic.

This introductory chapter sets out the focus of the book, namely the ideological turnaround and how the notion of the productive role of social policy has changed in the Swedish Social Democratic party's (SAP) economic and social policy discourse in the post-war period, from its ideology of the ‘strong society’ in the 1950s and 1960s, to the attempts to articulate an ideology around the notion of a third way in the early 1980s. The analysis focuses on the two key ideological concepts—‘security’ (trygghet) and ‘growth’ (tillväxt)—and how they are constructed and articulated in social democratic discourses on social policy over time, as ideological objectives in harmony or in deep conflict.

This chapter discusses the changes in the 1970s as a gradual emergence of a new ideology in reaction to the critique of the late 1960s. This can be discussed in terms of an ideological crisis of social democracy. This crisis was directly related to the changed standing of the concept of growth in social democratic ideology. The rearticulation of growth from a solution to social problems to being the problem itself created profound tensions in the strong society's worldview. Chapter 3 discussed social democracy's initial reaction to the critique of the late 1960s, which was to retain and defend the strong society's framings and particularly the standing of growth in party ideology. But in the transition between the 1960s and 1970s, a gradual process began where the Swedish Social Democratic party's (SAP) defensive position and ambivalent reactions to the critique were replaced by ideological rearticulation and eventually with a break with the strong society's framings. In this process, the SAP incorporated the metaphors and definitions of the problem of social exclusion that had been put forward in critiques of party ideology in the late 1960s.