ABSTRACT
It is not much of an overstatement to maintain that the ‘marginalist revolution’ in the last quarter of the nineteenth century consisted essentially of a generalisation of the principle of intensive diminishing returns to the treatment of all sorts of economic phenomena. It was felt that on the basis of this principle it would be possible to develop ‘a unified general theory to determine the prices of all productive services in the same way’ (Walras 1954 [1874]:416). In this perspective, marginalism is an offspring of the theory of differential rent as it had been developed by authors such as Thomas Robert Malthus (cf. Garegnani 1970:407; Bharadwaj 1978). If this interpretation is accepted then the path leading from that theory to the marginalist doctrine ought to be studied carefully.
