Jevons, William (1835–1882)

Abstract William Stanley Jevons is best known as an early influential British neoclassical and utilitarian economist mostly influenced by and developing Benthamite utilitarianism. More precisely, he is renowned among economists as one of the founders (alongside Menger and Walras) of marginalism or marginal utility theory (during the 1870s) as what economist‐sociologist Schumpeter describes as a Copernican Revolution in economics. While virtually unknown or neglected among sociologists, curiously enough, Jevons can probably be credited with inventing the term economic sociology (in the second 1879 edition of his main work, The Theory of Political Economy ), though not the idea or concept. The idea of economic sociology is already contained or germane in Comte, especially his notion of social economy, as a branch of sociology distinguished from orthodox economics, and of the “economy of real society” subject to “sociological research.”