JEVONS, WILLIAM STANLEY (1835–82)

JEVONS, WILLIAM STANLEY (1835–82)

Stanley Jevons is today known chiefly as the author of The Theory of Political Economy (1871), a work that broke with the Classical theory of production and distribution in linking the formation of prices to subjective choices formed by a calculus of pleasure and pain. Now linked with the names of the Austrian Carl Menger and the Frenchman Leon Walras as the originator of the ‘marginal revolution’ that in the 1870s founded the neoclassical framework that underpins modern economics, Jevons’s principal contribution was to turn the idea of subjective utility into mathematical form. In so doing

he drew upon a wider interest in formal logic and the sciences that preceded his foray into economic reasoning. Besides the Theory he contributed to debate on the exhaustion of natural resources by arguing in The Coal Question (1865) that coal reserves would quickly become exhausted, and also to the early analysis of economic fluctuations by making a link between the trade and the sunspot cycles.

Jevons was born in Liverpool on 1 September 1835, son of Thomas Jevons, an iron merchant, and Mary Ann, daughter of William Roscoe, a banker prominent in the cultural life of a city then second only to London in prosperity. His early life was however overshadowed by the death of his mother in 1845, the onset of his eldest brother’s mental illness in 1847 and the collapse of the family business in 1848. After beginning his schooling in Liverpool he was sent to the school attached to University College London (UCL), which he then entered in 1851 to study Mathematics and Chemistry. The Unitarian faith of his family barred him from entering existing English university institutions—Oxford, Cambridge and King’s College, London—since entry or graduation required a formal declaration of religious conformity. In 1853, however, he was offered the post of assayer at the Sydney Mint, and given the reduced state of his family’s finances he took the post without graduating, staying in Australia from 1854–9. During this time he studied botany and meteorology, from 1857 developing an interest in social and economic issues, his interest in a mathematical approach to economic argument being prompted by reading Lardner’s Railway Economy (1850).

Re-entering UCL in 1859 he earned his BA in 1860 and an MA in Logic, Philosophy and Political Economy in 1862. He sent two papers to Section F of the 1862 British Association meeting, one of them outlining a mathematical approach to economic reasoning, the other discussing seasonal price fluctuations. Neither paper attracted attention, and Jevons turned back to work on symbolic logic, publishing his own Pure Logic in 1863, the first of a series of publications that established his reputation. His cousin, Harry Roscoe, now a Professor of Chemistry at the newly opened Owens College in Manchester, suggested that he take a vacant post there as tutor preparing candidates for entrance to the college; Jevons accepted, and it was during this period that he published The Coal Question, which brought him national recognition as a political economist.

This was reflected in his appointment as Professor of Political Economy and Mental and Moral Science in 1866, although this was not a full-time post. While at Manchester

he continued to work on both logic and political economy, publishing in 1874 his important Principles of Science: A Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method, and in 1875 both Money and the Mechanism of Exchange and his first essay on sunspots and price fluctuations in the journal Nature. In 1876 he left Manchester for a chair in Political

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Economy at UCL, likewise not a full-time appointment, but with duties lighter than those

he had borne in Manchester. Nonetheless, he gave up this post in 1882 so that he could devote all his efforts to research and writing. He drowned while holidaying with his family on the south coast near Hastings in mid-1882.

The novelty of Jevons’s approach to political economy was rooted in his understanding of mathematics and logic. He contributed significantly to the development of the latter, having been taught by Augustus De Morgan at UCL and proposing that logical problems can be solved symbolically through their expression as algebraic equations. In 1870 he presented to a Royal Society meeting his ‘logical piano’, a primitive computer capable of replacing the thought processes involved in logical procedures. His Principles of Science presented a theory of scientific inference designed to resolve JOHN STUART MILL’S empirical method whose precision required an unattainable degree of completeness in the statement of premises. In its place he proposed

a conception of probabilistic reasoning, suggesting a way of measuring a reasonable expectation that an event would occur. This conception was to become of revolutionary significance for statistical analysis, but Jevons never made the link between this idea and his interest in prices and economic fluctuations. In any case, his chief concern in studying the latter was to establish the regularity with which highs and lows recurred, rather than identify the inherent causes of fluctuations. Although he believed there to be a causal linkage between the sunspot cycle and climatic variation, this linkage served to identify periodicity, rather than underlying economic variables.

Jevons’s contributions to logic, important enough at the time, were later eclipsed by the work of Frege and Whitehead. His new approach to the principles of economics had a similar fate, chiefly for lack of a wide enough audience. Although he had been, in part at least, a Professor of Political Economy in Manchester and in London, there was at this time a very limited demand for the systematic teaching of Political Economy to which his work contributed. He was known chiefly as a writer—a popular yet gifted and innovative thinker. It was not until the 1890s that teaching Political Economy in Manchester became

a full-time occupation. It was ALFRED MARSHALL, not Stanley Jevons, who stamped his name on the new British academic economics, publishing in 1890 his own Principles of Economics, and in 1903 founding at Cambridge the first three-year university course in economics.