Axel Hagerstrom

Axel Anders Theodor Hägerström (September 6, 1868, Vireda – July 7, 1939, Uppsala) was a Swedish philosopher and jurist.

Born in Vireda, Jönköping County, Sweden, he was the son of a Church of Sweden pastor. As student at Uppsala University, he gave up theology for a career in philosophy. Teaching there from 1893 until his retirement in 1933, he attacked the then dominant philosophical idealism of the followers of Christopher Jacob Boström (1797-1866). He is best known as a founder of the (quasi-) positivistic Uppsala school of philosophy—the Swedish counterpart of the Anglo-American Analytical Philosophy as well as of the Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle—and as the founder of the Scandinavian legal realism movement.

Some of his work was published by the Muirhead Library of Philosophy.

He was Inspektor of the Östgöta nation from 1925 to his retirement in 1933.

The jurisprudential camp of legal realism, broadly speaking, consists of those scholars who strictly reject the concept of natural law and who believe that legal concepts, terminology and values should be based on experience, observation and experimentation and are thus, ‘real’. This empirical, or sceptical, view taken by the ‘realists’ can be contrasted with a more rational view taken by others, such as H.L.A. Hart, the English philosopher, who took a more formalistic approach and had the opinion that such concepts can survive through the application of a priori reasoning or logic only.

Hägerström is considered to be the founding father of the Scandinavian school of legal realism. His disciples Karl Olivecrona, Alf Ross and Anders Vilhelm Lundstedt all take a similar basic view to Hägerström in their opinions on the language of Western law. Due to their verdict on natural law, they also reject the concept of human rights.

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