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One the Prying Eyes of the Natural Scientist Cambridge University Press 0521827124 - William Stanley Jevons and the Making of Modern Economics Harro Maas Excerpt More information one The Prying Eyes of the Natural Scientist William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) isunquestionably one of thegreat minds inthe history of economics. Today, he is remembered as one of the “fathers” of the so-called marginalist revolution in economics. Withhis Theory of Po- litical Economy (1871), decisions of economic agents came to be analysedby means of thecalculus, interms ofdeliberations over marginalincrements of utility. In this “mechanics of utility and self-interest” (TPE2 90), economic agents – whetherintheir roleof consumers, workmen, or other – came to be seen as maximising utilityfunctions. Themarginalist revolution was a definitive breakwith the labour theory of value–value came to be iden- tifiedwith exchange value, and this was identifiedwith marginal utilities, not with the costs ofproduction. Jevons isalso rememberedforhis inno- vative contributions to theempirical, statistical study of the economy. He ardently propagated the use of graphstopictureand analyse statisticaldata. He introducedindex numberstomake causalinferences about economic phenomena. In short, there isnoparticleof economicscience, theoretical or empirical,towhich Jevons did not make important contributions that are, today,consideredrevolutionary. Jevons is one of the fathersof modern economics, indeed. This summary evaluation of the importance of Jevons’s contributions to economics contrasts starkly with the image wegain fromasuperficial glance at hiscontemporaries. In his lifetime, Jevons was well valued as an able statistician, but many of the leading contemporary political economists consideredhis pursuits in mathematical economics as obscuring thesubject. It was only the younger generation of scientists and economists – likeGeorge Darwinand FrancisYsidro Edgeworth – whoappreciated thenovelty and 1 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521827124 - William Stanley Jevons and the Making of Modern Economics Harro Maas Excerpt More information 2 William Stanley Jevons and the Making of Modern Economics fruitfulness ofhis ideas.1 It is worthquoting from John StuartMill’s fa- mous letter to Cairnes on Jevons’s Theory to illustrate his reservations (Mill 17:1862–3):2 I have not seen Mr. Jevons’s book, but as far as I can judge from such notices ofitashave reached me, I do not expect thatIshall thinkfavourably ofit. He is a man of some ability, but he seems to have a mania for encumbering questions with useless complications, andwith a notation implying the existence of greaterprecision inthe data than the questions admitof. Mill (1806–1873) was not alone in his judgement.Reviewsof the book – from, amongst others, Alfred Marshall (1842–1924)and John Elliot Cairnes (1823–1875)–were quite sceptical.3 Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900), thegreat utilitarian philosopher, downplayed the importance of Jevons’s use of the calculus whileacknowledging the importance ofhisnew utility theory of value.4 In the 1875 re-edition of John Elliot Cairnes’s influential Lectures on the Character and Logical Method of Political Economy,Cairnes even wrote that the work ofhis “able friend” did not give himanyreason to alter the views on methodhe had expressed as early as 1857.Reservations to the Theory weremade not only by those whom Jevons explicitly attacked –theclassical economists – but also by political economists of the historical school, such as Cliffe Leslie(1825–1882)and John KellsIngram (1823–1907), who favoured detailedhistorical explanations over theoryabstractedfrom historicaldetail, whether expressed verbally or mathematically. These conflicting appraisals from past andpresent leave us with an enigma ofhow to evaluate Jevons’s place inthe history of economics. Using Roy Weintraub’s recent distinction between the body and the image of ascience 1 See also Schabas (1990), Chapter 7. 2 Mill, Letter 1698, 5 December 1871,toCairnes. 3 In lateryears, Marshall admitted that he was angry about the bookfor two reasons. Firstly, he hadbeen thinking along the lines of Jevons; secondly, being an ardent admirer ofRicardo and theClassicalSchool, he feltthat injustice hadbeen done to them inthe Theory.See Schabas (1989). Amore general account of the reception of the Theory istobe foundin Schabas (1990). Inoue’s recent collection ofreviewsof Jevons’s work corrects the impression that the general response to the Theory was negative. This was farfrom the full picture.See Inoue (2002, 2:187–297). 4 Sidgwickfully acknowledged theadditional challenge Jevons’stheory of utilityposed to classicalpolitical economy that had come under severe pressure with William Thornton’s On Labour and John StuartMill’ssubsequent “recantation” of the wage fund theory. For Thornton’s influence on economictheory, see, for example, Chaigneau (1997), Donoghue (1998), Ekelund and Thornton (2001), Vint (1994), and White (1994b). © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521827124 - William Stanley Jevons and the Making of Modern Economics Harro Maas Excerpt More information The Prying Eyes of the Natural Scientist 3 (2002, 1–2)–that is, between its substance andits perceived methodsand history –this book traces these conflicting appraisalsof Jevons back to thecontrasting images ofpolitical economy that were defendedbyJevons himself andhiscontemporaries. From an evaluation of these contrasting images, itmaybeunderstoodwhyand to what extent Jevons can be seen as one of the fathersof modern economics. Hence, myfocus isonthe changing methodsofpolitical economy, not on thechanges in its theoretical content.Beforegoingintoanydetail,itwillbeusefulto brieflyreviewexisting appraisalsof Jevons’s work. Jevons’s Place in the History of Economics Muchhas been written about Jevons’s place inthe history of economics. Starting withKeynes’sandRobbins’s centenary appraisalsof Jevons, these studies have considerably deepened ourknowledge and understanding of Jevons’s work and thecontextin whichit was produced. In his beautiful and dense essay on Jevons, Keynes paid equally high tribute to the Theory and to Jevons’s statistical studies. At home as well inabstract theory as inthe “black arts ofinductive economics”, Jevons was, according to Keynes, “the first theoretical economist to surveyhis materialwith the prying eyes and fertile, controlledimagination of the natural scientist” (Keynes [1936] 1988, 66).Robbins even wenttotheextreme when he noted that the “sheer genius” of Jevons’s “capacityin handling facts”,morethan the Theory, was perhaps his “most conspicuous claimtofame” (Robbins [1936] 1988, 101). Keynes’s portrayal of Jevons – as scrutinising the data, spending “hours arranging hischarts, plotting them, sifting them, tinting them neatly with delicate palecolours liketheslides of the anatomist, and all thetime poring over them andbrooding over them to discover their secret” ([1936] 1988, 66)–rightly describes himaspursuing an anatomy,orphysiology,of society, althoughKeynes’s account ismore imaginative than informative.Scientists use instruments and experiments to let the data speak,and thismight be only vaguely inferredfrom Keynes’s description. Moreover, Keynes seems to have meant this description only for Jevons’sempirical studies, whereas it was generally considered that his most important innovation was the introduction of aspecific instrument – thecalculus – into economics. Collison Blackdeliveredhis centennial commemoration of Jevons’sfirst airing ofhismarginalist ideas in his “Notice of aMathematical Theory of © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521827124 - William Stanley Jevons and the Making of Modern Economics Harro Maas Excerpt More information 4 William Stanley Jevons and the Making of Modern Economics PoliticalEconomy” (readin 1862 to sectionFof the British Association for theAdvancement ofScience (BAAS)). In 1962, Blackhadjust recently discov- ered a wealth of materialinthe possession of Jevons’sgranddaughter,Mrs Kone¨ kamp, whichprovided newinsight into Jevons’s lifeandwork. Con- trary to what might perhaps beexpectedfrom Black’smodestywithregard to hiseminent predecessors, hisandKone¨ kamp’sedition of these papers, from 1972 through to 1981, have greatly contributed to a renewedinterest inJevons’s work. Various detailed studies appearedregarding exactly what Jevons’s contribution was to the so-called marginalist revolution (see, espe- cially, Black et al. 1973). His contribution to the development of statistics and econometrics is discussedin detail inseveralhighly valuable studies (e.g., Stigler 1982; Aldrich 1987, 1992; Morgan 1990). His relation to his predeces- sorsand successors has also been extensively examined (e.g., Bostaph and Shieh 1986;Schabas 1989, 1990;Kim 1995;Peart 1993, 1995a, 1996; White 1989, 1991b, 1994a, 1994b, 2004b). From these in-depth studies, a muchricherim- age emerges of Jevons as one of the foundersof“modern economics” –asin thetitleofBlack’s contribution to the Bellagioconference on themarginal- ist revolution in economics (Black et al. 1973). Thetermechoes Robbins’s depiction of marginalist economictheory as theunifying coreof modern economics (White 2004). The Bellagioconference on themarginalist revolution deserves some special attention. Obviously, not only was Jevons’s work addressed, but also themore generalissue ofwhether there was any unifying coreatall inthe work of thethree founding fathersof the “marginalist revolution”,aswas once
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