Introduction to the Publication of Knut Wicksell’s Lectures on the Economic Consequences of the First World War (1919)

In our preparations for the Arne Ryde Symposium on the Theoretical Contributions of Knut Wicksell, we made a search for interesting works of Wicksell which had not previously been published or translated into English. In spite of the very large amount of printed notes, articles and books by Knut Wicksell—the bibliography by E. J. Knudtzon and T. Hedlund-Nyström Knut Wicksells tryckta skrifter 1868–1950 (The Publications of Knut Wicksell, 1868–1950)1,2 contains more than 800 items—the archives at the Lund University Library were found to hide many largely unknown, handwritten manuscripts of Wicksell, mostly fairly complete notes to courses or lectures. The mimeographed publication which we presented at the symposium2 contains Wicksell’s notes to his lectures in Uppsala in 1919 on “The World War: An Economist’s View” (Världskriget ur ekonomisk synpunkt), and his notes to a series of lectures in Stockholm in 1889, “On Value, Capital and Interest according to Modern Economic Theories”. We also included a translated version of the first chapter of the first edition (1901) of Wicksell’s “Lectures on Political Economy”, which for some particular reason had never been translated into English.