The Economics of W.S. Jevons (review)

This is the first book to cover W. S. Jevons’s work in applied economics and policy investigations and to link it to his work on theory and methodology. It reads very well and is based on extensive research. Sandra Peart paints Jevons in a very positive light, praising him for his many contributions to various branches of economics. Indeed, she stresses the disjointed nature of Jevons’s ouevre, while at the same time emphasizing that Jeremy Bentham’s hedonic calculus was at the center of both his theoretical and applied economics.

That said, I wish the book had been more controversial. Jevons is hardly a simple figure to square in the history of economics. There is little in this account that captures the oddity of Jevons’s approach to economic problems, or his remarkable grasp of other fields. Given the accusations made by Philip Mirowski—that Jevons was part of a broader conspiracy to disguise economics as physics—and the efforts by Michael White, and myself, to link Jevons to movements in natural science, logic, and the philosophy of science, Peart’s account by contrast is cautious and reserved. Now and again she acknowledges these alternative readings, and notes that Jevons was polymathic, but her orientation is highly internal to the history of economics.

Peart strongly emphasizes the continuity between Jevons and the classical economists, particularly J. S. Mill. Jevons’s Coal Question, she argues, is Malthusian through and through. Similarly, Jevons’s efforts to identify business cycles and link them with solar cycles (perhaps one of the most original ideas ever proposed in the history of economics) is seen to be part of a continuous tradition in empirical economics. Nevertheless, Peart admits that Jevons repositioned economic theory around the concept of utility in a way that was markedly different from his predecessors.

Perhaps the decision to stress continuity or discontinuity in the history of ideas is just a matter of taste. But in the case of Jevons it seems hard not to be infected by his manifesto-like accusations. To smooth over the differences between him and the classical economists strikes me as peculiar. Indeed, Peart often notes in passing that Jevons gave more weight to the role of individual deliberation, whether in consumption, investment, labor participation, or family size. This alone is a significant departure from the classical view, in which the differentiated mental acts of individuals hardly figure at all. There is not enough room here to support the claim that the neoclassical theory is significantly different from the classical, but the simple fact that we have two different names for two different periods of economic theorizing suggests that the burden of proof is on the shoulders of those who would speak to continuity. Jevons undoubtedly shared some ideas with the classical economists, but surely the interesting story lies in his break with the past.