Economic history of Sweeden

Four years ago, the Stockholm Institute for Economic History published a pamphlet entitled: The Bibliography of Eli F. Heckscher, 1897-1949.* This list which contains no less than 1,148 items is in complete now, because it does not include writings which appeared after 1949. I doubt that Professor Heckscher ever counted the number of words he had written-as Arnold Bennett used to do each New Year's Eve- and his staggering productivity has a mean ing other than that of statistical curiosity. It reflects a life which from adolescence to old age was governed by a relentless sense of work to be done. But to work meant to serve and amassing knowl edge meant communicating it to others. Heckscher's scholarship was never merely passive, absorptive. He was and remained to the end a scholar in action.

The enormous extent of Heckscher's output makes a compre hensive appraisal of his contribution extremely difficult. A large part of his writings, particularly most of the articles published in the daily press, have remained inaccessible to me. In addition, my grasp of Swedish intellectual life is loose and uncertain, even though I have. received enlightenment and guidance from some of the articles on Heckscher which appeared in Sweden after his death, and particu larly from the excellent paper by Arthur Montgomery, to which this Preface is much indebted. Accordingly, I can but present here some biographical data and try to stress certain aspects of Heck scher's work, in the hope that the result, though incomplete, will not too badly distort the image of a great economic historian.