The Coal Question

William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882) was an English economist and logician. His work, along with similar discoveries made by Carl Menger in Vienna (1871) and by Leon Walras in Switzerland (1874), marked the opening of a new period in the history of economic thought. He published General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy in 1862, outlining the marginal utility theory of value. He was a prolific writer, and at the time of his death he occupied the foremost position in England both as a logician and as an economist. Jevons' general theory of induction was a revival of the theory laid down by Whewell and criticized by John Stuart Mill; but it was put in a new form. Amongst his other works are The Coal Question (1866), Methods of Social Reform and Other Papers (1883) and Letters and Journal (1886).