In 1884, P.H. Wicksteed published a critique of the first volume of Marx's Capital, the first detailed analytical encounter in English between Marx's value theory and the new discourse of marginalism. In revisiting that episode, this article has three principal objectives. The first is to show how Wicksteed developed his understanding of political economy, as he moved from initially following Henry George's Progress and Poverty. The second is to examine why Wicksteed's defence of George necessitated criticizing the Marxist Social Democratic Federation. The third is to show that Wicksteed's criticisms of Marx were simply incorrect.

It has been argued that The Happiness of States by Simon Gray contains a precursor analysis of a Giffen good. That reading, however, produces a misleading account of the significance of Gray’s text within a teleological history of Giffen behaviour. After providing some new information for Gray’s biography, this article shows that he was one of the few nineteenth-century British political economists who argued that speculators did not necessarily play a beneficial role in food markets. It is also shown how Gray’s text has been read to install him as a pioneer of the twentieth-century Giffen good.

It has been claimed that references to 'Giffen behaviour' constituted a single research project, driven by attempts to establish whether an initial 'conjecture' by Alfred Marshall had empirical validity. There is no stable basis for that claim because Marshall's discussion was contradictory and Robert Giffen rejected a key assumption made by Marshall. By the mid-1920s, discussion of an upward-sloping demand curve attached no particular significance to a Marshallian story. The formulation of the Irish famine Giffen exemplar by P.A. Samuelson illustrates how Giffen behaviour was stabilised as the single possible exception to the law of demand in the 1960s.

The enigmatic William F. Lloyd is the subject of this study. We wish to provide the contemporary (and modern) context for those of Lloyd's economic ideas that, according to many, anticipated modern theoretical conceptions. The two most famous declarations in which modern concepts are attributed to Lloyd are E. R. A. Seligman's (1903) conjecture that Lloyd used the law of diminishing marginal utility to derive a modern theory of value, and Garret Hardin's (1968) assertion that Lloyd was one of the earliest scholars to recognise the tragedy of the commons. We argue that Lloyd developed his economics ideas at the very end of an era in which political economy at Oxford was driven by two charismatic dons, Richard Whately and Charles Lloyd (brother of William F. Lloyd), who operated from power bases at the then two dominant colleges at Oxford—Oriel and Christ Church respectively—and who wielded their influence via their two most famous and more capable charges, Nassau Senior (who Whately prepared for exams) and Robert Peel (who Lloyd prepared for exams). We conclude that William F. Lloyd's (non-marginalist!) economic framework emerged out of the debates driven by the Whately-Senior and Lloyd-Peel axes and, further, was ultimately deployed to attack the poor law reforms that were being engineered by Senior in the early 1830s.

In 1883 Henry Sidgwick complained that, with the recent undermining of the authority of political economy, "utterances of dissent from economic orthodoxy" could obtain a ready hearing. This was of particular concern to those writing and teaching on political economy at Cambridge University. As Henry Dunning Macleod was one of the dissenters named by Sidgwick, it appears odd that Macleod was also recognized as a lecturer in political economy at Cambridge between the late 1870s and mid-1880s. This article examines that peculiar occurrence, showing how Macleod exploited the struggle between reformers and conservatives over teaching reform in the university.

This bibliography of publications by W. Stanley Jevons makes a number of significant changes to the extensive bibliography published by Inoue and White in 2002. Fourteen new entries are identified, which include reviews, an obituary of Charles Babbage, a series of articles regarding Jevons’s Coal Question and the record of a previously unknown appearance by Jevons as a witness before a House of Commons Select Committee. Information has also been added, or corrections made, to seventeen existing entries. It is argued that two entries that were previously attributed to Jevons should be deleted from his bibliography.

One frequently quoted passage from the work of John Maynard Keynes is that "the best way to destroy the capitalist system [is] to debauch the currency." The passage, attributed to Vladimir Illyich Lenin, appears in Keynes' book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which became an international bestseller when it was published in 1919. Economic historian Frank W. Fetter and others have expressed doubt that Keynes was really quoting Lenin because they found no such statement in Lenin's collected published writings. Fetter suggested that Keynes based his remark on stories about what the Soviets were supposed to be saying that he heard at the Paris peace conference of 1919. It is now possible to show that Keynes based his remark on a report of an interview with Lenin published by London and New York newspapers in April 1919. Keynes' discussion of inflation in the Economic Consequences can then be read as an extended commentary on the remarks attributed to Lenin in the interview. While the report of the interview was not reprinted after 1919, it will be also shown here that Lenin responded to Keynes in a speech that was reprinted in his Collected Works.

In his 1936 memoir of W. Stanley Jevons, J. M. Keynes argued that Jevons's pronounced hostility to the dominance of J. S. Mill's political economy was due, in large part, to the imposition of Mill's work on Jevons's teaching at Owens College (subsequently the University of) Manchester. Keynes reported that a recently discovered set of student lecture notes confirmed his argument. He was subsequently accused of poor scholarship in that regard, because the contents of the one known set of student notes did not tally with his description. It is shown here, however, that Keynes was referring to a different set of notes that have only recently been located. Keynes was misled, nevertheless, in assuming that the notes he examined could establish his case. Moreover, although Jevons's statements could be confusing, the available evidence indicates that his complaints about the constraints on his teaching were principally concerned with logic and philosophy, rather than with political economy.

Mountifort Longfield's Lectures on Political Economy has generally been characterised as a highly original precursor of the late-nineteenth-century marginalist economic framework. Focussing on Longfield's discussion of value and utility, this paper shows that he was actually using a variant of the Classical framework that was quite different from that of marginalism. Far from exhibiting any substantive originality, the analysis owed a good deal to texts such as J. R. McCulloch's Principles of Political Economy. In explaining why the marginalist precursor characterisation is incompatible with the terms of Longfield's analysis, the paper also considers some difficulties that follow using the category of a precursor in constructing histories of economics.

Describes the various components of W.S. Jevons’s work in Australia between 1854 and 1859 and the context in which it was produced. Explains how a complete list of Jevons’s Antipodean publications has been compiled from his sometimes confusing records. Discusses his social survey of Sydney, demonstrating that his manuscript was censored when published in 1929 by the Sydney Morning Herald. An appendix lists all Jevons’s Australian publications. I am becoming quite accustomed to the pen as a weapon of offence and defence….I often write a newspaper article and am then on thorns for ever so long after for fear of a libel action.William Stanley Jevons, October 1858

In The Theory of Political Economy (1871), W.S. Jevons argued that his representation of rent theory in the form of the calculus had provided a ‘clue to the correct mode of treating the whole science’. An explanation for the clue could cast some light on how Jevons’s marginalist theory was produced, although he failed to do so. This article suggests that an explanation turns on identifying the way that Jevons had transformed his predecessors’ rent theory. The explanation, in turn, clarifies how the calculus imposed a particular form of theoretical representation that constituted an analytical break with preceding work in British political economy.

While the usual caveat on responsibility applies, I would like to thank John Aldrich, Robert Dixon, Ivor Grattan-Guinness, Peter Groenewegen, John King, Harro Maas, Bruce McFarlane, Bert Mosselmans, and participants in a History and Methodology Group seminar, Faculty of Economics and Econometrics,University of Amsterdam, for helpful comments and/or discussion. I am particularly indebted to Philip Mirowski for detailed comments and suggestions.

This paper discusses and reprints two additions to the bibliography of published works by W. Stanley Jevons. The first, concerning Jevons’s sunspot theory of commercial fluctuations, is a signed letter, published by the Athenaeum in February 1879. The second item is a review of the first volume of Henry Dunning Macleod’s Economical Philosophy, published by the Manchester Guardian in June 1873. Unlike the sunspots letter, the review was unsigned. I suggest, however, that it can be attributed to Jevons with a high degree of probability and that it helps explain some puzzling aspects of Jevons’s comments regarding Macleod in his Theory of Political Economy

Although W. S. Jevons’s use of the concept of a ‘trading body’ in his Theory of Political Economy has often been criticized as unsatisfactory, much of the subsequent commentary has obscured the role of the device in Jevons’s argument and the reason why he used it. It is shown here that the coherence of the argument depended on a peculiar claim Jevons made regarding the domain of his analysis of exchange. The claim was made to minimize the problem of commodity indivisibility which became important for Jevons following the debates over the laws of supply and demand which preceded the publication of the Theory .

In a recent article in this Journal, Robert Ekelund (1997) has renewed his criticism of the discussion of price formation in William Thornton's On Labour (1869) and criticized the work of “modern supporters” of Thornton, such as Kenneth Dennis, Philip Mirowski, Takashi Negishi and myself. While that work differs in the precise significance attributed to On Labour, there is agreement that Thornton's critique of contemporary explanations of “the laws of supply and demand” and/or his discussion of price formation do not warrant the negative and dismissive treatment they have often received from historians of economics. Ekelund disagrees. Based on “preposterous notions,” Thornton's work was “worse than nonsense” and, as he did not understand contemporary explanations of supply and demand, he should “receive a grade of ‘F’; (with strongly worded advice to return to the pursuit of poetry and sociology)” (Ekelund, 1997, pp. 11, 20, 21). Five examples are given below showing that this evaluation of On Labour depends on misinterpretation of the meaning, context and significance of Thornton's analysis.

The Manchester SchoolVolume 62, Issue 1 p. 97-102 JEVONS AND THE POPULATION MECHANISM: COMMENT* MICHAEL V. WHITE, MICHAEL V. WHITE Monash University While the usual disclaimer applies on responsibility for the final product, I would like to thank referees for helpful comments on an earlier draft.Search for more papers by this author MICHAEL V. WHITE, MICHAEL V. WHITE Monash University While the usual disclaimer applies on responsibility for the final product, I would like to thank referees for helpful comments on an earlier draft.Search for more papers by this author First published: March 1994 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9957.1994.tb00648.xCitations: 5 * Manuscript received 6.8.92; final version received 30.11.92. AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL References R. D. C. Black, (Ed.) (197381). The Papers and Correspondence of William Stanley Jevons, Vols. II–VII, London , Macmillan. Hollander, S. (1987). Classical Economics, Oxford , Blackwell. Hollander, S. (1990). “Ricardian Growth Theory: A Resolution of Some Problems in Textual Interpretation”, Oxford Economic Papers, Vol. 50, No. 4 pp. 730– 750. Jevons, W. S. (1866). “Brief Account of a General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy”, Journal of the Statistical Society, Vol. 19, pp. 282– 287. Jevons, W. S. (1871). The Theory of Political Economy, London , Macmillan. Jevons, W. S. (1883). Methods of Social Reform, London , Macmillan. Jevons, W. S. (1906). The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coal Mines ( Third Edition), edited by A. W. Flux, London , Macmillan. Jevons, W. S. (1910) [1878]. Political Economy, London , Macmillan. Peach, T. (1990). “Samuel Hollander's 'Ricardian Growth Theory': A Critique”, Oxford Economic Papers, Vol. 50, No. 4 pp. 751– 764. Peart, S. J. (1990). “The Population Mechanism in W. S. Jevons's Applied Economics”, The Manchester School, Vol. 58, No. 1 pp. 32– 53. Roberts, M. J. D. (1991). “Reshaping the Gift Relationship. The London Mendicity Society and the Suppression of Begging in England 1818-1869”, International Review of Social History, Vol. 36, No. 2 pp. 201– 231. Scrope, G. P. (1833). Principles of Political Economy, Deduced from the Natural Laws of Social Welfare and Allied to the Present State of Britain, London , Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown Green and Longman. White, M. V. (1991a). “Frightening the ‘Landed Fogies’: Parliamentary Politics and The Coal Question”, Utilitas, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 289– 302. White, M. V. (1991b). “A Biographical Puzzle: Why did Jevons write The Coal Question?”, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Vol. 13, No. 2 pp. 222– 235. White, M. V. (1992). “ Following Strange Gods: Women in Jevons's Political Economy”, typescript. Citing Literature Volume62, Issue1March 1994Pages 97-102 ReferencesRelatedInformation