5. Thoughts such as Turgot's betrayed the increasing
economic awareness brought about by the increased
commercialization of economic life and, especially, by
the ebullient transformation of the Industrial Revolu-
tion. Students of economic affairs not only became
more visibly interested in the problem of value but
also, on the disappearing trails of mercantilism, began
searching for the source of value. An economy, such
as that of France ruined by the wars of Louis XIV
and crippled by a nobility who deserted the country-
side for Versailles, led François Quesnay to see the
source of value in natural resources, particularly in the
agricultural ones. “Rich peasants, rich kingdom,” is the
way he epitomized his doctrine. Equally natural is
the fact that an economy—such as England's during
the same period—which could not find enough hands
to keep pace with a revolutionary increase in the de
mand for manufactured wares, should have inspired
Adam Smith to see in labor alone the source of value.
Unfortunately, the rise to glory of the classical school
also meant a total return to the Aristotelian ideas and
hence a setback for the correct approach to the prob-
lem of utility initiated by Galiani and Turgot. While
classical economists freely admitted that a thing must
have some use value in order to have a market value,
they scorned—as David Ricardo did most clearly in
the essay “Absolute Value and Exchangeable Value”
written shortly before his death in 1823—any thought
that the individual may have something to say about
the value of a commodity. And with his excellent logic
Ricardo could but acknowledge and defend the star-
tling conclusion that the value of the income of a
society does not increase at all if, after any technologi-
cal innovations, the society produces more goods with-
out employing more labor.
There certainly was an anachronism in the re-
enthronement of the notion of an invariant demand,
just as the forces of the Industrial Revolution began
swaying markets and values. The problem of why
people do not spend their income entirely on bread
or entirely on pearls did not exist for the followers of
Adam Smith even after Lord Lauderdale lectured them
on its importance. Small wonder then that a consum-
mate economist and philosopher such as J. S. Mill could
proclaim in 1848 that “happily, there is nothing in the
laws of value which remains for the present or for any
future writer to clear up; the theory of the subject is
complete” (Principles of Political Economy... 7th ed.
[1961], p. 436).
The British as a whole spoke the language of utility,
as the historian Élie Halévy judged. Only the British
economists, who lived under the great shadow cast by
Adam Smith and Ricardo, remained immune to
Bentham's influence. Even in the awakening from their
slumber Bentham's utilitarianism played a very small
role. The event came as economists everywhere were
compelled to pay attention to the increasing impor-
tance of the consumer in an expanding market capable
of satisfying a growing spectrum of wants. It was not
a mere coincidence that, almost at the same time and
independently of each other, four authors came up with
an almost identical theory of utility: H. H. Gossen in
Germany (1854), W. Stanley Jevons in England (1871),
Carl Menger in Austria (1871), and Léon Walras (1874)
in France. Gossen alone poses a problem to the his-
torian because at the time the historical school of
thought ruled supreme in Germany. But this condition
accounts for the injustice done to the author who not
only anticipated the others by many years, but also
excelled them in many respects. Even today his name
is overshadowed by those of the others.
