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The 1930s, characterised by repercussions from World War I and the Great Depression, was an era of populism, nationalism, protectionism, government intervention and attempts to create planned economies. The perceived need for economic planning emerged in Sweden in part due to the increasing political strength of the Social Democrats and their evolution from a party hampered by Marxist fatalism to a pragmatic mass movement. The Swedish debate continued beyond World War II and is still relevant to today's economic crises, which have resulted in a demand for action coming from below (populism) and above (elitism). Carlson surveys the arguments for and against economic planning as they were put forward by leading Swedish economists in the 1930s, with a focus on the thoughts of Gustav Cassel, Eli Heckscher, Gösta Bagge, Gunnar Myrdal and Bertil Ohlin, among others. In so doing he provides a timely exploration of the debate on the necessary and desirable extent of state intervention in market economies.

The 1929 stock market crash on Wall Street is one of the most spectacular economic events of all times. In Sweden, leading economists got involved in a lively debate on the events on Wall Street before, during, and after the crash. Three of them were particularly active. Gustav Cassel and Bertil Ohlin were not overly worried since they regarded the stock market mania and the panic as phenomena more or less disconnected from the rest of the economy. Their theoretical argument was that booms and busts upon a stock market cannot create or destroy capital or purchasing power. Johan Åkerman, on the contrary, warned repeatedly that a serious stock market crash was in the making and, once it had happened, that it would in many ways affect the entire economy.

For most of his life economist and economic historian Eli Heckscher was the most firmly principled economic liberal Sweden had. He fought against state-socialist tendencies, Keynesian crisis policy, and economic planning. In his younger days, however, he was a social conservative who adopted an almost state-socialist stance. This article provides an account of Heckscher's ideology and its development, drawing on previously untranslated policy-oriented discourse and focusing on Heckscher's movement toward market liberalism. It details Heckscher's liberal insights in political economy and his fears of a government with unprecedented resources, the creation of a "Frankenstein's monster."

During the period 1871–1918, Sweden was under the in.uence, in many respects, of intellectual currents emanating from the German Empire. On the plane of economic policy many Swedish social scientists and public debaters were in.uenced by GermanKathedersozialismusand state socialism. In Sweden, as in other countries, this heritage has long been tucked out of view in historical writings, perhaps because there was not much to boast about after the defeat of the "German model" in the First World War.1 Interest has begun to awaken in recent years, however. Leading economists such as Gustav von Schmoller and Adolph Wagner have attracted attention (see e.g., Backhaus 1997) and their in.uence in the United States has been examined (Carlson 1999, Rodgers 1998, and Senn 1997). In Sweden, too, interest in GermanKathedersozialismusand state socialism is rising with respect to its in.uence on social scientists (Wisselgren 2000) and (social democratic) politicians (Karlsson 2001).

The continual interaction between economic change and economic policies designed to manage or guide this change seldom finds such dramatic expression as when one type of economy replaces another, e. g., when the industrial economy replaces the agrarian or is in turn supplanted by the "post-industrial" economy.Thus, when the American economy was in the thick of its industrial revolution during the decades around the turn of this century, it was subjected to a series of government interventions the lowest common denominator of which has been summarized in the title of a book by Morton Keller, Regulating a New Economy (1996). In the United States as in all other countries, these interventions consisted of a glorious jumble of attempts to solve problems as they arose, of "bespoke jobs" in response to diverse economic interests, and of sundry ideologically-motivated efforts to move events in particular directions.