ABSTRACT
The first area of economic theory to be revolutionized through the rediscovery of the marginal principle was the theory of value. Three brilliant men, William Stanley Jevons (1835-82), working in England, Carl Menger (1840-1925), working in Austria, and Léon Walras (1834-1910), working in Switzerland, independently formulated a theory of exchange value based on the principle of diminishing utility. Jevons’s work The Theory of Political Economy (1871) was preceded by Notice of a General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy. Menger’s Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre was also published in 1871, and Walras’s Eléments d’économie politique pure ou théorie de la richesse sociale, was published in two parts in 1874 and 1877.
