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William Stanley Jevons
1835–1882
A pioneering Victorian thinker, he helped reshape economics by arguing that value depends on utility at the margin rather than labor alone. He also ranged far beyond economics, writing on logic, statistics, and the social questions of industrial Britain.
2 Audiobooks
Political economy
by William Stanley Jevons
The principles of science : $b a treatise on logic and scientific method
by William Stanley Jevons
About the author
Born in Liverpool in 1835, William Stanley Jevons became one of the key figures in the "marginal revolution" in economics. He is best known for The Theory of Political Economy (1871), a book that helped establish marginal utility as a central idea in modern economic thought. Britannica and Wikipedia also describe him as an important logician, reflecting how comfortably he moved between economics, mathematics, and philosophy.
Jevons studied in London and spent several years in Australia working at the Sydney Mint before returning to England. That period sharpened his interest in careful measurement and scientific method, which shaped much of his later work. Alongside economics, he wrote on logic and developed a reputation for trying to make the social sciences more exact and quantitative.
His books include The Coal Question (1865), an influential study of industry and resources, as well as major works on logic and political economy. He died in 1882 near Hastings, Sussex, but his ideas continued to influence both economics and the history of statistics and logic long afterward.