Harro Maas, William Stanley Jevons and the Making of Modern Economics. Historical Perspectives on Modern Economics (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

The subject of this book is the polymath William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882). While historians are familiar with Jevons’s The Coal Question (1865), foreseeing a fuel crisis in the days before oil, economists know the author as cofounder of the “marginalist revolution.” In the early 1870s, responding to classical political economy, Jevons introduced a mathematical calculus of the decisions of economic agents in terms of marginal increments of utility. Harro Maas claims that it was Jevons’s profound faith in mechanism that enabled him to reconstruct political economy. The elaboration of that claim makes Maas’s work interesting to historians of science.