The Life of Knut Wicksell and Some Characteristics of His Work

Knut Wicksell was born in Stockholm in 1851. This was the year of the Great Exhibition in London, to which millions of people from the British Empire and the Western world came to admire the products of a rapidly expanding industrial system. In 1851 John Stuart Mill had married Mrs Taylor and with her begun to work on the radical pamphlets which were to be of a far greater general influence than the Principles of Political Economy he had recently published. 1851 was also the year of birth of two other members of the rising profession of economists—Böhm-Bawerk and von Wieser—and several of their colleagues-to-be were born only a few years earlier: Wicksteed, Edgeworth, Clark and Pareto.