Towards the end of the preceding chapter, I attempted to explain what led the artisan journeymen of Stockholm and Johan Hjerpe to take part in Gustavus III's showdown with the nobility in the spring of 1789, an episode worthy of a war novel. Although this was not stated, my interpretation was based on a set of general hypotheses about the human mind. The hypotheses underlay the text as its analytical precondition, which perhaps made the interpretation difficult to follow, and possibly also more provocative than it would otherwise have been. At the same time, fuller explanations would have been even more irritating for those who do not like theories.

But we have now come to the theoretical part of the diptych, and it is appropriate here to unearth what was buried in the preceding part. I shall do so by formulating and developing a number of hypotheses about mentalities and other forms of human thought. The aim is not, however, only to facilitate the reading of the preceding chapter: there are also more general motives behind such a discussion.

One is that I like the concept of mentality while others dislike it. A contested concept must be clarified by whoever wishes to use it, especially if it is considered hazy by others. And this is precisely what it is. During the past decade or so, the concept of mentality as well as the history of mentality has been criticised as much as applied.

A number of scholars, such as Robert Darnton of Princeton, have complained about the vagueness of the concept, although it should be pointed out that Darnton himself has recently begun to express himself in more positive terms about research into mentality, perhaps as a function of his longstanding polemic with Roger Chartier. Among Swedish researchers, the ethnologist Orvar Löfgren can be seen as a representative of the sceptics.

Others such as Carlo Ginzburg, for instance, regard it as being too much of a consensus term, masking the cultural and ideological differences or conflicts between social classes. Consequently, in his empirical studies, he has substituted the concept of mentality for popular culture, which in turn has recently been exchanged for the concept of representation, the new-old catchword.

I can see no reason to discard the concept of mentality because of these objections.