------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------  
Published by EH.NET (November 2006)  
  
Harro Maas, _William Stanley Jevons and the Making of Modern   
Economics_. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xxii + 330   
pp. $75 (cloth), ISBN: 0-521-82712-4.  
  
Reviewed for EH.NET by Michael V. White, Department of Economics,   
Monash University.  
  
  
In early November 1871 an unsigned obituary of Charles Babbage was   
published by the science journal _Nature_. It was a heart-felt piece   
of writing, the tone set by an opening observation that "to the   
majority of people he was little known except as an irritable and   
eccentric person, possessed by the strange idea of a calculating   
machine, which he failed to carry to completion." Any "deficiencies   
in his character," however, "arose ... from excess of resolution ...   
He sowed ideas, the fruit of which have been reaped by men less able   
but of more thrifty habits." It was thus the tragedy of Babbage that   
only "those who have carefully studied a number of his writings can   
adequately conceive the nobility of his nature and the depth of his   
genius." The work that placed Babbage "among the few greatest men who   
can create new methods or reform whole branches of knowledge"   
included early mathematical papers and the `calculating machine'   
project, consisting of the Difference and Analytical engines. The   
latter was particularly remarkable in that it was projected "to be   
little less than the mind of a mathematician embodied in metallic   
wheels and laws. It was to be capable of any analytical operation,   
for instance solving equations and tabulating the most complicated   
formulae." No less important was Babbage's work in political economy.   
_The Economy of Manufactures_ (1831) was "incomparably excellent" and   
"impossible to overpraise." Noting Babbage's role in the formation of   
the London Statistical Society, it was also argued that his analysis   
of the Clearing House (1856) "was probably the earliest paper in   
which complicated statistical fluctuations were carefully analysed."   
If Babbage had "devoted his lofty powers to economic studies, the   
science of Political Economy would have stood by this time in   
something very different from its present pseudo-scientific form."[1]  
  
The obituarist was W. Stanley Jevons, whose own attempt to rework   
value and distribution theory in a scientific form had just rolled   
off the printing press as _The Theory of Political Economy_ (TPE).   
Given Jevons' marked tendency to depression, it might be wondered   
whether anxiety over the possible reception of TPE marked the   
obituary, particularly the evocative discussion of instruments for   
the Analytical Engine which he had seen when visiting Babbage:  
  
     Before 1851 he appears to have despaired of its completion,  
     but his workshops were never wholly closed. It was his pleasure  
     to lead any friend or visitor through these rooms and explain  
     their contents. No more strange or melancholy sight could well be  
     seen. Around these rooms in Dorset Street were the ruins of a  
     life time of the most severe and ingenious mental labours  
     perhaps ever exerted by man. The drawings of the machine were  
     alone a wonderful result of skill and industry; cabinets full  
     of tools, pieces of mechanism, and various contrivances for  
     facilitating exact workmanship, were on every side, now lying  
     useless.  
  
I can guess that, if the attribution to Jevons had been well known   
before now, the obituary would have had a prominent place in _William   
Stanley Jevons and the Making of Modern Economics_ by Harro Maas from   
the University of Amsterdam. This stimulating and innovative book   
argues that Jevons' `theoretical' and `statistical' publications in   
political economy, often treated as analytically quite separate, were   
actually closely linked. They were underpinned by a mechanical   
representation of the human mind that was symbolized by Jevons' own   
logical machine. Although Jevons paid homage to Babbage in that   
regard, Maas emphasizes how Jevons' machine mimicked logical   
inference rather than numerical calculation. If, as the obituary   
noted, Babbage's work appeared to be "highly fragmentary," the same   
could be said today about Jevons' oeuvre and one great merit of Maas'   
analysis is to show how a number of linkages can be made to help   
explain the formation of Jevons' political economy. Having immersed   
himself in the primary and secondary literature from a number of what   
are, today, quite separate disciplines, Maas combines detailed   
discussion of the analytical content and context of Jevons'   
experimental machine work with a nice eye for evocative contrasts.  
  
It should be noted that Maas does not provide a detailed overall   
account of Jevons' political economy. There is, for example, no   
analysis of much of the arguments, the structure and objectives of   
TPE. Maas focuses, instead, on particular features of Jevons' work   
such as the marginalist theory of behavior and the key   
characteristics of the statistical studies, such as the use of graphs   
and the construction of index numbers. The reason for that focus is   
the book's central argument that Jevons' principal and substantive   
analytical break with economists such as J.S. Mill and J.E. Cairnes   
lay in his "methods [of research] and goals of explanation" (p. 25).   
He followed and contributed to a British "style of reasoning" which,   
by the mid-nineteenth century, had blurred the distinction between   
mind and matter to represent the mind and behavior in mechanical   
terms. This dissolved the distinction between the `moral' and the   
`natural' sciences so that the methods of the latter could be used to   
rework political economy.  
  
The methodological break had two interrelated components. The first   
was a representation of mind and behavior which drew on a number of   
resources, such as the formalization of logic, undertaken by Boole   
and De Morgan, which made logic "the embodiment of rationality par   
excellence" (p. 285). Jevons contributed to that literature, which   
Maas neatly links to his discussion of Jevons' logical machine. Also   
important were developments in engineering mechanics, where human   
labor was analyzed as a `force' and hence discussed in the same terms   
as work performed by inanimate machines. (Babbage's _Economy of   
Manufactures_ was used in that context). The decisive contribution,   
however, came from the new discourse of physiological psychology   
which, via Richard Jennings' _Natural Elements of Political Economy_   
(1855), enabled the representation of behavior in a functional form.   
Jevons was then able to depict equilibrium conditions in production   
and exchange via the metaphor of a balance of pleasure and pain.  
  
Maas clearly explains how Jevons' use of the balance was based on his   
training in chemistry and work as an assayer while in Australia   
(1854-59). A focus on Jevons' practice is also a feature of the   
second component of Jevons' methodological break that Maas   
identifies. This was to provide a statistical basis for political   
economy by using a number of experimental devices from the natural   
sciences, once again underpinned by the use of mechanical analogies.   
Here, Maas considers Jevons' well known statistical work on   
commercial fluctuations (business cycles), as well as his attempts to   
`verify' the behavioral theory in TPE and his use of the balance   
metaphor to construct price indexes. One of the most innovative   
features of the book is the use of Jevons' (Australian) experiments   
in simulating cloud formations to identify his more general   
procedures. Maas argues that, for Jevons, the objective was to   
produce natural laws of phenomena, expressed, if possible, in a   
"rational formula" by mathematics. That did not, however, involve   
fitting graphs and formulae to the "data," that is, the actual   
empirical observations which were contaminated by errors. Instead,   
the formula identified the "phenomena" of causal connection between   
variable and variant postulated by the law. Suitably manipulated in   
the form of averages, the data then provided evidence for the   
existence of the phenomena. The analysis here is very illuminating.   
It moves the discussion well beyond what can now be seen as vague   
references to Jevons `testing' his theories and helps to explain the   
key role that Jevons gave to metaphors in his _Principles of Science_   
(1874). Moreover, it enables Maas to show how Jevons constructed the   
evidence for his arguments and why his approach could result in   
"dogmatism." although Maas insists that the latter had "fruitful"   
effects in "many cases" (p. 235). (Commentators who have identified   
Jevons' work with a `fallibilist' empiricist epistemology might   
become apoplectic at that point.)  
  
It is now becoming something of a commonplace to argue that Jevons'   
training, work and publications in the `natural' sciences were   
crucial for the formation of his political economy. Where Maas breaks   
new ground is in his detailed discussion of Jevons' experimental   
machine work, carefully explicating its content, context and   
relevance. Being familiar with the primary Jevonian sources that Maas   
utilizes, I very much admire the ways he has placed Jevons' work in a   
perspective from which I learned a great deal.  
  
There are, however, some difficulties. At times, the treatment of   
Mill and Cairnes descends into caricature, such as the claim that   
they "held statistics in disdain" (p. 210). This can lead to   
artificial divisions, such as the suggestion that Jevons' methodology   
dissolved Mill's distinction between a science and an art (p. 233),   
whereas Jevons actually used that distinction. I was also unhappy   
with the rather careless discussion of the characteristics of   
equilibrium in TPE (pp. 271-76). Apart from such specific points, a   
more general matter should be raised about the claim that Jevons'   
most important analytical break lay in his `method.' This has the   
unfortunate effect of making a distinction between `method' and   
`content.' Although the analysis of Jevons' experimental practice   
undermines the distinction, it does play a role at some points which   
can be illustrated with TPE. As was noted above, Maas provides no   
detailed discussion of the contents of TPE, so the reader is given no   
means to assess the extent and significance of the theoretical   
break(s) that Jevons made with his predecessors. I have no doubt   
about the relevance of Jevons' `method' as Maas describes it. But the   
absence of any discussion of most of the contents of TPE leaves the   
claim about the core of the break significantly underdetermined.  
  
A distinction between form and content is also evident in the   
treatment of mathematics which, for Jevons, included geometry as well   
as the calculus. Both components are critical for understanding and   
assessing the arguments in TPE. It is surprising, however, that while   
Maas often mentions mathematics, he pays little specific attention to   
its role(s) in TPE and the status it was accorded by Jevons. This   
exclusion, in effect, of mathematics from the domain of Jevons'   
method has two results. The first is that no attention is paid to the   
theoretical effects of the calculus in TPE. I would suggest, however,   
that among those effects were a number of marked analytical breaks.   
It is unclear why any privilege should be granted to Maas' `method'   
in gauging their relative importance. The second result is that there   
is no substantive discussion of the epistemological status Jevons   
accorded mathematics. Linking his argument with claims that Jevons'   
procedures foreshadowed the later `hypothetico-deductive method,'   
Maas claims that, for Jevons, "all science is hypothetical." So he   
did not treat the `laws' of marginal utility as if they had   
"introspective certainty," but rather as "hypotheses in need of   
verification" (p. 286). If this is difficult to reconcile with the   
discussion of Jevons' experimental `dogmatism' that was referred to   
above, Jevons was very clear that the utility theory was "true,"   
precisely because of its mathematical format and regardless of any   
particular statistical validity. I wish that Maas had paid the   
careful attention to Jevons' mathematics that he exhibits in his   
discussion of those matters which are considered in this remarkable   
book.  
  
Note:  
  
1. "Charles Babbage. Died the 20th of October, 1871," _Nature_ 9   
November 1871, pp. 28-29. Jevons was identified as the obituarist a   
century later [_Nature_, 5 November 1971, p. 2], an attribution that   
only recently came to my attention.  
  
  
Michael White has published extensively on nineteenth-century   
political economy with particular reference to the work of W.S.   
Jevons.  
  
Copyright (c) 2006 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be   
copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to   
the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the   
EH.Net Administrator ([log in to unmask]; Telephone: 513-529-2229).   
Published by EH.Net (November 2006). All EH.Net reviews are archived   
at http://www.eh.net/BookReview.  
  
-------------- FOOTER TO EH.NET BOOK REVIEW  --------------  
EH.Net-Review mailing list  
[log in to unmask]  
http://eh.net/mailman/listinfo/eh.net-review