ABSTRACT
A first element of Jevons’s contribution to the ‘marginalist revolution’ was a vehement support for the use of mathematical methods in economics.4
He claimed that economics should be mathematical on the basis that (a) it deals with quantities throughout, and (b) the use of mathematics is a sine qua non condition for scientific reasoning. Therefore, it was of vital importance to him that economists were able to recognise not only the mathematical character of science but also the possible analogies between economics and the other ‘more developed’ sciences. He explicitly argued that his theory was ‘purely mathematical in character’ and that in more general terms ‘It is clear that Economics, if it is to be a science at all, must be a mathematical science’ ( Jevons 1879: 3). What he had in mind was the application of differential calculus and mechanical analogies to what he considered to be the core of economic behaviour: the Benthamite mathematical approach based on a hedonistic conception of human behaviour.
