Johan Vilhelm Snellman

Ennobled in 1866, he is commemorated annually on his birthday, 12 May, which is celebrated as the Day of Finnish Identity.

Johan Vilhelm Snellman studied at Åbo Akademi University and University of Helsinki. Training under Johan Jakob Tengström is recorded. August Ahlqvist is recorded as having studied under Johan Vilhelm Snellman. The recorded working language is Swedish. The field of work recorded is Finnish and Finns. Places of work recorded in the authority are Helsinki. Employment is recorded with University of Helsinki. Positions recorded include member of the Diet of Finland. Distinctions recorded are Order of St.

Snellman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, the son of Christian Henrik Snellman, a ship's captain, and Maria Magdalena Röring. In 1813, four years after Sweden had ceded Finland to Russia in the Finnish War, the family moved to the Ostrobothnian coastal town of Kokkola (then known in Swedish as Gamlakarleby), where Snellman's mother died the following year. He attended school in Oulu and entered the Royal Academy of Turku in 1822, initially intending to study for the priesthood, alongside the slightly older J. L. Runeberg and Elias Lönnrot. He soon turned to philosophy and took his master's degree in 1832. He settled in Helsinki in 1828 when the university was moved there after the Great Fire of Turku. In 1835 Snellman was appointed lecturer (docent) at the University of Helsinki, and became closely associated with Hegelian philosophy. In this respect the Finnish university was distinctive within the Nordic countries, where philosophy at the time was largely dominated by Schellingian idealism; Hegelian thought, by contrast, had been firmly established in Helsinki by Snellman's teacher Johan Jakob Tengström. His advocacy of academic self-government brought him into conflict with the university authorities, however, and in 1838 his lectureship was temporarily suspended.

As a consequence, Snellman left Finland in 1839 and spent the years 1839–1842 in Sweden and Germany. In Stockholm he served as assistant editor of the weekly Freja and intervened in the literary debate around Carl Jonas Love Almqvist's controversial novella Det går an, publishing his own response Det går an. Fortsättning (1840). He then spent nearly a year in Tübingen, where he wrote Versuch einer speculativen Entwicklung der Idee der Persöhnlichkeit (1841). The work was an intervention in the religious-philosophical controversy that had split the Hegelian school following David Friedrich Strauss's biblical criticism, addressing the relation between "universal" and "particular" personality; in Tübingen Snellman met Strauss in person and read Ludwig Feuerbach for the first time. Returning to Stockholm, he published his principal work of political philosophy, Läran om Staten (The Doctrine of the State), in 1842. In it Snellman departed from Hegel by complementing conceptual analysis with a historical, relativising examination of the state, and identified the level of education (Bildung) as the most important factor shaping the life of a nation.

By the time Snellman returned to Helsinki in 1842, the political situation did not allow the university to employ him. Instead, he took up the position of headmaster of a school in distant Kuopio and from 1844 published the starkly polemical newspapers Saima in Swedish and Maamiehen Ystävä in Finnish. Through these papers Snellman introduced modern public debate and social criticism into Finland and advocated that the educated classes should take up the language of the Finnish-speaking majority and develop Finnish into a language of academic and civic life. In doing so he explicitly drew on the contemporary national movements among the Czechs, Irish and Hungarians, applying their arguments and rhetoric to Finnish conditions. Saima was suppressed by the government in 1846, after which Snellman continued his journalism in the periodical Litteraturblad. In 1845 he had married Johanna (Jeannette) Lovisa Wennberg (1828–1857), with whom he had several children before her death in 1857.

Johan Vilhelm Snellman first appeared on a 1960 coin, commemorating the introduction of the markka denomination in 1860. He was later selected as the main motif for the €10 Johan Vilhelm Snellman commemorative coin, minted in 2006 to mark the 200th anniversary of his birth. A park in Kuopio called the Snellman Park (Snellmaninpuisto) is named after him. In the centre of the park stands a bust of Snellman sculpted by Johannes Takanen, unveiled on 3 July 1886. Snellman's birthday, 12 May, is one of Finland's flag days and is celebrated as the "Day of Finnish Identity" (also known as "Finnish Heritage Day").

Snellman's principal philosophical works include Försök till en framställning af Logiken (1837), the three-part Philosophisk Elementar-Curs (1837–1840), Versuch einer speculativen Entwicklung der Idee der Persöhnlichkeit (1841) and his political-philosophical magnum opus Läran om Staten (The Doctrine of the State, 1842). His collected works have been published in Swedish and Finnish editions.