2011/02/14 by Antonietta Campus · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Political Economy and Marxism #Economic Theory and Institutions
paper · doi:10.1057/9780230226203.3031
openalex publication_date 2011/02/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/02/24
Unsystematic ideas about use value and demand and supply as determinants of the exchange value of commodities, which were developed parallel with, and in opposition to, classical theory, found a systematic treatment at the beginning of the 1870s in W.S. Jevons’s Theory of Political Economy, C. Menger’s Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre (both published in 1871), and Walras’s Eléments d’economie politique pure (published in two parts in 1874 and 1877). It is usual to mark the beginning of marginalist economics with the appearance of these works, in which the long-sought relationship between use value and exchange value was established for the first time. Earlier works on use value (i.e. utility – reinterpreted in subjective terms) had now led after various elaborations to the principle of decreasing marginal utility (see Dmitriev 1902; Stigler 1950).