The project concerns the completion of a biography of Eli F. Heckscher, the Swedish economist and economic historian. Heckscher lived during a period when modern Sweden was emerging. I mean not only that Sweden was industrialized, urbanized and democratized, but that modernity in the sense of individualism and modern institutions were created. He belonged to a generation that debated and took a stance on this process, and he problematized and historicized it in his research. He took part in the planned economy debate, acted as a popular educator, fought his duels with the Stockholm School on the role of the state in the economy and sat on several committees. He was a strong personality, and much of the source material also testifies to the conditions of science in the first half of the 20th century, and the struggling man's negotiations with this emerging modernity. In this way, the biography being written is both an intellectual biography and an analysis of high modern Sweden. My idea is that it will, as Johan Asplund once wrote, constitute the slash in the conceptual pair of man/society.