William Stanley Jevons

Overview

William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) was an English economist and logician, and — alongside Carl Menger and Léon Walras — one of the independent founders of marginal-utility theory, set out in his Theory of Political Economy (1871). This "marginal revolution" reshaped value theory around subjective, marginal utility rather than the classical framework Ricardo and George had used, and is generally credited with opening the analytical shift toward the later marginal-productivity theory of distribution.[1] Jevons held the chair of political economy at Owens College, Manchester, from 1866 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1872.[1]

Jevons's relationship to the land question was double-edged. He was a pioneer of the marginalist apparatus that later economists — most explicitly John Bates Clark — would use to dissolve the classical distinction between land and capital that underpins the Georgist case. Yet Jevons himself did not erase that distinction rhetorically: in the preface to the second edition of the Theory of Political Economy (1879), he wrote that "property is only another name for monopoly," a line frequently quoted by land-value-tax writers as a marginalist-era acknowledgment that property rights over scarce resources like land confer monopoly power rather than simply reward productive effort.[2]

See Also

• Economic Rent — the classical concept Jevons's marginalism reworked
• David Ricardo — the classical rent theorist whose framework Jevons's marginal revolution superseded
• John Bates Clark — the economist who later used marginal-productivity theory explicitly against Henry George
• Henry George — Jevons's contemporary, working the land question from the older classical framework

Sources

1. Mark Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect (5th ed., 1997) — used for Jevons's role in the marginal revolution and his academic career (A-claims; book locators pending fuller scan). Book page
2. William Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, 2nd ed. (1879), Preface — used for the "property is only another name for monopoly" quotation, verified this session. Wikiquote