​Welcome to Jan Olof Bengtsson: Spirituality – Arts & Humanities – Europe. On this page is found some general information about me and my work, followed by a few comments on this blog and information about my presence in social media. I write in English here and in some posts since I have friends and former colleagues in other countries who do not speak Swedish, and since others abroad may also wish to read me.

I am best known for my book The Worldview of Personalism: Origins and Early Development (2006), a revised version of my Oxford DPhil thesis from 2003. Its publication was followed by a lecture tour in the US and panels at conferences there, including an Author Meets Critics panel at the American Philosophical Association. In 2008, a special issue of the philosophical journal The Pluralist was devoted to the book.

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I have contributed a limited number of articles to academic journals and other publications since the mid-1980s, and for many years taught the history of ideas at Lund University, although to an equally limited extent. I have also, with some regularity, presented papers at international philosophy conferences on idealism and personalism.
 

Since the early 1990s, I have also attended conferences on interfaith dialogue and the transmission of Eastern spirituality to and its reception in the West. In the 00s, I participated in seminars (including my own) at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, taught Western philosophy at Bhaktivedanta College in Belgium - although only very little - and contributed to the moderated internet forum Vaishnava Advanced Studies (VAST).

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There are three levels of my writing and speaking, somewhat imperfectly indicated by the terms Spirituality, Arts & Humanities, and Europe. Spirituality refers to what could be described as a “soft” interpretation of the perennialism of the so-called traditionalist school, transcending western philosophy and theology - and in some respects even what in the Abrahamic religious traditions appears to be only “esotericism” and “mysticism” - in the direction primarily of Vedanta, but retaining a strong emphasis on a qualified pluralism. Arts & Humanities represents the level of humanistic culture, and includes philosophical idealism and personalism, partly developed in terms of so-called value-centered historicism, yet open to the mentioned transcendent perspective and dimension of spirituality. Europe actually includes politics in general, as viewed in the light of a general creative traditionalism and higher cosmopolitanism emerging from the mentioned positions on the spiritual and humanistic levels.

 

While having a partly socialist family history that was always important to me, due to my early spiritual experiences I became strongly critical in the first half of the 1980s of socialist and communist anti-religious and culturally destructive radical policies, and thought that a civilized, culturally conservative right offered better prospects for supraordinate spiritual, moral and classical humanist values than the left. In the 1980s, I therefore wrote a little for one of the Christian Democrats’ publication, then wrote and lectured for the Swedish “conservative” party (Moderaterna) and the think tank Timbro, and also taught, to a limited extent, the history of political philosophy at the largely libertarian so-called City University in Stockholm; they all seemed to have a niche for the kind of conservatism I believed in.

 

But having become, in the course of the 00s, increasingly disappointed by and alienated from the neoliberal and neoconservative right in view of the historical development in the mentioned respect, I joined the Sweden Democrats in 2010, and in 2015-16 was a member of their party board in Stockholm. When they then allied with the atlanticist right which I had just left, I had to leave them too, realizing that it was necessary to begin to describe myself as a kind of socialist conservative. Most of the existing socialist countries and parties had revised their view of religion and supraordinate values, and, in the late 10s, new socialist intellectual and political groups began to emerge in the west, including precisely in the United States, which uniquely accepted the legitimacy of some conservative and populist nationalist criticisms of what was in reality the distinctively non- and post-Marxist political correctness and wokeness of the establishment. My new self-designation was a conditional, contingent one made in view of the problems with atlanticist imperialism, and for the purpose of facilitating an alternative order.​​

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There are two other Pages in the menu. On the Contents page are found clickable titles of posts on my old WordPress blog with my own writing, by category and in order of publication, with the most recent ones first. Publications contains information about some of my scholarly and other print publications. 

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