Theodor Heidhues’ Contribution to the Analysis of Agriculture and International Relations

Nearly two years ago, on 11 November 1978, Theodor Heidhues died at the age of 45. His friends, colleagues and students, German and international agricultural economists, realise that his untimely death has left a great gap in agricultural economics, both in research and theory, which even today can hardly be closed. We especially miss his creative imagination which enabled him to order and analyse economic conditions, to trace the economic and social factors behind them and to illuminate their manifold and complex political and social implications. ‘The master economist’, as John Maynard Keynes described him, ‘must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must reach a high standard in several different directions and must combine talents not often to be found together. He must be a mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher — in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general and touch abstract and concrete in some flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purpose of the future’ (Keynes, 1972, p. 173).