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Thanks, Tim Leonard, for the enlightened discussion of the Anglophone literature. If your
description is accurate (and I have no reason to doubt it), it is remarkable how this
literature was able to disregard developments elsewhere.
 
First, there is Vilfredo Pareto's notion of "ophelimity," which sought to completely
circumvent many of the problems
that occupied the 20th century British writers by discarding the term (Pareto, Manual of
Political Economy, Ch. 3). (The indifference approach introduced by Pareto -- and
Edgeworth -- was incorporated into the Anglophone lit, however.)
 
Second, there seems to be no recognition of the 20th century Austrian Ludwig von Mises, in
which "Utility means...simply: causal relevance for the removal of felt uneasiness. Acting
man believes that the services a thing can render are apt to improve his own well-being,
and calls this the utility of the thing concerned."(Mises, Human Action, 1966 [German,
1940], p. 120). (Of course, whatever language "acting man" might use, _economists_ have
called the expected differential in well-being "utility.") Thus, "utility" resides in the
mind alright; but not necessarily in the mind of the actor. The expected differential,
however, does reside in the minds of people who economists have chosen as their subject
matter. Elsewise, economics is the science of behavior, not choice.
 
Third, this most abstract definition seems to have been largely anticipated by American
Herbert Davenport in his penetrating 1902 critique of how economists had been using the
concept of marginal utility. Davenport's critique basically blew the indifference approach
(and the mathematical approach based on it) away before the dust had
settled around it (in "theory," that is). 
 
Davenport, H.(1902) "Proposed Modifications in Austrian Theory and Terminology."Quarterly
Journal of Economics. 16 (May): 355-384.
 
Except for Lionel Robbins, the Brits seem to have completely overlooked Davenport. His
name is conspicuous in Mark Blaug's _Economic Theory in Retrospect_, my undergraduate
koran, by its absence.
 
Of course, even  the later American historians of thought (as opposed to the American
historians of the economics profession) paid little attention to Davenport. The name is
not in Ekelund and Hebert's index either. Where is the utility in that?
 
 
Pat Gunning 
 
 
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