Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

William Stanley Jevons is best known as an early influential British neoclassical and utilitarian economist mostly influenced by and developing Benthamite utilitarianism ( Schumpeter 1991 ). More precisely, he is renowned among economists as one the founders (alongside Carl Menger and Leon Walras) of marginalism or marginal utility theory (during the 1870s) as what economist-sociologist Schumpeter (1954) describes as a Copernican Revolution in economics (for more on Jevons as an economist, see Mosselmans & White 2000 ). Overall, his sociologically minded disciple Philip Wicksteed (1905) describes Jevons as “one of the most powerful, bold, and original thinkers” in economics. While virtually unknown or neglected among sociologists, curiously enough, Jevons can probably be credited ( Swedberg 2003 ) with inventing the term economic sociology (in the second 1879 edition of his main work, the Theory of Political Economy ), though not the idea or concept. The idea of economic sociology is already contained or germane in Comte, especially his notion of social economy, as a branch of sociology distinguished from orthodox economics, and of the “economy of real society” subject to “sociological research.” Specifically, Jevons (1965) suggests “it is only by subdivision, by recognizing a branch of Economic Sociology, together possibly with two or three other branches of statistical, ... log in or subscribe to read full text