Conceptual Politics of Human-Centricity: the Case of State-Formation in Finland

This paper examines the concept of human-centricity, which has been increasingly prevalent in transnational policy-making on various governance problems, especially concerning technological and social development. Transnational organizations from the European Union, World Economic Forum to the International Labour Organization have employed the concept in order to reinvigorate the social contract in times of diminishing institutional trust and uncertain economic progress. In The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that a government is legitimate only when it allows humans to obey only themselves, which would guarantee them to ‘remain as free as before’ (Rousseau 1997, 50). The concept of human-centricity in contemporary transnational policy debates entail a promise for Rousseauian form of social contract that emphasizes self-governance. However, the employment of the concept of human-centricity in contemporary policy-making typically remains non-historical and non-empirical. Human-centricity in policy-making is approached through frameworks and principles that remain analytically ambiguous and empirically limited. For this reason, I will explore human-centricity through a case study of Finnish policy-making, looking with conceptual history how the concept of human-centricity has been applied in state-formation since the World War II. Employing Claudia Wiesner’s (2023) approach of conceptual politics, I will formulate human-centricity as an analytical category in politics of the welfare state. In Finland, human-centricity has been a nodal point in the discussions on the institutional effects of technological and social development for political order and public authority. Despite a case study focusing on Finland, I will approach human-centricity as a concept of transatlantic political thinking. Human-centricity is connected to various institutional, political, economic, and cultural currents in political thought in the post-war era, which underline the need for countervailing powers for centralized administrative systems. Various scholars wrote arguments for human-centric thinking, either as grassroots governance, human empowerment in economic theory, decentralization of political power, vivification of social structures, or as a principle for more creative thinking in industrial design. The core of the arguments was an opposition to the technocratic characteristics of post-war societies. Analyzing human-centricity in Finnish policy-making within a transatlantic context of political thinking provides theoretical and empirical substance on human-centricity as an application of social contract in the field of state-formation. Moreover, the historical exploration of human-centric institutional processes and governance practices in state-formation provides means to assess the implications of human-centric thinking for the ideal of self-governance, which for Rousseau implied democratic control of power.