Three sources and three heroes of the Marginal Revolution

Abstract

The article is devoted to the 150th anniversary of Marginal Revolution and deals with “patristic legacies” leading to the works of William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger and Léon Walras. The British empiricist-utilitarian tradition which inspired Jevons, the German subjectivist tradition culminating in the work of Menger, and the French Cartesian tradition, the traits of which can be easily seen in Walras, happened to give birth to similar theories of value and price based on marginal utility. All three also contributed to the creation of exact economic science. But the forms their theories took, as well as the policies they recommended, were very different and this difference could be explained by the different, nationally specific sources of their thought.