ABSTRACT
A new economics of market prices and resource allocation was developed in several countries from the early 1870s. It is well known that, in England, that development was initiated by Jevons, consolidated by Marshall from the 1890s, and reinforced through the work of their colleagues, followers, or students: Wicksteed, Edgeworth, and Pigou in England, J. B. Clark and Irving Fisher in that other vast English-speaking world across the Atlantic. As Schumpeter (1954) pointed out, the key English figures in these developments are Jevons and Marshall, but this does not mean that the theoretical contributions to the new economics by the other leading figures in these developments on both sides of the Atlantic can be ignored. This is clearly demonstrated by the pioneering literature of this epoch in the history of economic thought. Stigler (1941), in his account of the formative period of the new production and distribution theory, only omits Pigou from his study, while Fisher, though not given a chapter of his own in the book, is mentioned as a prominent exponent of the new economics in the United States on a par with J. B. Clark. The other important specialist in early history of this period (Hutchison 1953) likewise acknowledges these economists as the great English-speaking contributors to this new, more rigorous form of economics that based itself on the application of a marginalist method to problems of choice and generalized price determination theory. The views expressed in these authoritative sources combined with Stigler’s (1950) equally authoritative account of the development of utility theory form the point of departure from which to review more recent work on these ‘English speaking’ marginalist pioneers.
