Henning Fonsmark and the reformulation of Danish democracy in the 1990s

This article uses the editor and public intellectual Henning Fonsmark as a prism through which to explore critiques of democracy in late twentieth-century Denmark. It shows how Fonsmark innovatively combined criticism of the welfare state with opposition to the left-wing dominance in the fields of culture and education and the left’s conception of democracy as a way of life. After describing Fonsmark’s contribution to criticism of the welfare state from the 1970s onwards, the article argues that an important part of Fonsmark’s legacy was his construction of a concept of democracy that ran counter to the social democratic understanding of democracy as pitting the people against the elite. Moreover, the article stresses that, in interpreting the ideological takeover of the Danish welfare state by the left, Fonsmark helped to mobilize opposition to the allegedly cultural and educational hegemony of the left, which was to become an important element of the Danish right’s culture wars at the end of the twentieth century.