ABSTRACT
One scientific revolution in fact concealed another. While Keynes was preparing and publishing The General Theory, a radical change was beginning, the full effect of which would not be felt until much later: the mathematicization of the discipline. The use of mathematics in the area of economic thought was well established: in the seventeenth century, William Petty, Charles Davenant, Gregory King and others in England created what they called ‘political arithmetick’,1 and made the first inroads in the area of national accounting. King is considered to be the author of the first quantitative estimation of a demand function. In 1738, mathematician Daniel Bernoulli formulated the hypothesis of the individual’s diminishing marginal utility of wealth, illustrating it in a diagram showing, on the abscissa, gains in wealth and, on the ordinate, corresponding utilities.2
