ABSTRACT
§1. Jevons, in his Theory of Political Economy, stated certain first principles with a brilliant precision of which none of his predecessors had been capable. “In the last few months,” he wrote to his brother in 1860, “I have fortunately struck out what I have no doubt is the true Theory of Economy, so thorough-going and consistent that I cannot now read other books on the subject without indignation.” 1 A few weeks later he wrote that he hoped his forthcoming book would “re-establish the science on a sensible basis.” 2 In 1871 the Theory of Political Economy was published. In 1882, at the age of forty-six, Jevons was drowned while bathing. His early death was a serious loss to economic science. He left behind him, indeed, in addition to his Theory, and various less important writings, two other books which will always rank as economic classics, namely, The Coal Question and Investigations in Currency and Finance. But he had scarcely begun the book which he regarded as the “work of his life,” and which he intended to call The Principles of Economics: a Treatise on the Industrial Mechanism of Society. Of this project we have only a table of contents and a few chapters and fragments of chapters. The chapters on distribution are among those that were planned but never written. An edition of these fragmentary Principles was published in 1905 by Mr. Higgs. 1
