ABSTRACT
In 1878, well after publishing his self-proclaimed revolutionary Theory of Political Economy (1871), William Stanley Jevons learned of an obscure earlier book on similar lines by Hermann Heinrich Gossen (1854). Although taken aback, Jevons acknowledged handsomely in the preface to the second edition of his work (1879b: 34) that ‘Gossen has completely anticipated me as regards the general principles and method of the theory of Economics’. While chagrined at the loss of his claim to priority with regard to the ideas associated with the new concept of marginal utility, Jevons found consolation in the opportunity of ‘making that understood and valued which has been so sadly neglected’ (1879b: 36-7). He also took the fact of the coincident discoveries, together with the cognate work of Jules Dupuit and Léon Walras, as establishing the ‘great probability, not to say approximate certainty’ of the new ideas (1879b: 38).
