2. The notion of utility, in fact, goes back under
other names twenty-five centuries to the philosophers
of ancient Greece, who first raised the problem of what
endows certain things with an economic value. The
march of ideas has been unusually slow and exasper-
atingly tortuous, not only because there were numerous
genuine obstacles to circumvent, but also because at
times spurious ones were created. Nevertheless, one
can distinguish four salient landmarks.
The earliest landmark is represented by a thought
of a very modern facture. There are two elements
involved in economic value: an intrinsic property of
the commodity and the user's ability to enjoy it. As
Xenophon observed in his Oeconomicus, even though
a flute has no value for one who cannot play it, it has
a market value because others can. However, the fa-
miliar conviction that science requires a monistic ex-
planation led a long line of students to move away
from this thought in order to look for a single cause
of value.
Clearly, such a cause must be either in us or in
things, but not in both. And since in early times hardly
anyone could think of pleasure as a measurable entity,
the tenet that “the value of a thing lies in the thing
itself”—as J. B. Say was to formulate it not very long
ago—won by default. Other factors, however, account
for the long survival of this commodity fetishism, a
second landmark. There was, first, the authority of
Aristotle, from whom the idea originated (Nicoma-
chean Ethics 1133a 25-26). Secondly, any thought that
there may after all be a subjective element in economic
value was stifled by the so-called paradox of value,
which, according to Plato (Euthydemus 304), was
known even to the poet Pindar. This paradox points
out that some vitally important things (such as water)
have a very low exchange value or none at all, while
others (such as diamonds) have very little importance
and a very high exchange value. Ergo, value cannot
be in man.
Like many other traditional dogmas, commodity
fetishism suffered a setback during the Age of the
Enlightenment. And, as always, the reaction embraced
the diametrically opposite view. This view, the third
landmark, is that “a thing does not have value because,
as is assumed, it has a cost; but it has a cost because
it has value [in use],” as Étienne de Condillac sum-
marized it about 1745 (
Oeuvres philosophiques...,
2 vols. [1948], 2, 246).
The fourth landmark is the modern theory which
views utility as being neither in things nor in us, but
in a relation between us and things, and which explains
value as the balance determined by the members of
an economy between utility and disutility.
