Introduction

Despite his centrality to mid-century international politics, Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal has seldom been the object of sustained historical attention beyond his native Sweden and the United States. This dossier attempts to offer a fuller picture of his career through reconsiderations of most of his major works, from his early writings on Swedish population policy to his last works on the problem of global poverty. In doing so, it not only contributes to these national historiographies on Myrdal, but also attempts to place him, in all of his guises, back into conversations on the intertwined histories of national welfarism, international organizations, and social science in the mid-twentieth century.