W. Stanley Jevons - The State in Relation to Labour

The State in Relation to Labour

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The State in Relation to Labour, W. Stanley Jevons
with a new introduction by Warren J. Samuels

with a new introduction by Warren J. Samuels

W. Stanley Jevons

Originally published in 1887 by Macmillan and Co.

Published 2002 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2001027311

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jevons, William Stanley, 1835-1882.
The state in relation to labour / W. Stanley Jevons; with a new introduction by Warren J. Samuels.
p.cm.(Classics in economics series.)
Originally published: London; New York: Macmillan, 1887.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-7658-0867-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Labor laws and legislationGreat BritainHistory19th century. 2. Labor movementGreat BritainHistory19th century. I. Title. II. Classics in economics.

KD3009 J48 2001
344.4101dc21 2001027311

ISBN 13: 978-0-7658-0867-7 (pbk)

WILLIAM Stanley Jevons (1835-1882) was one of the first great virtuoso scholars in economicsor in political economy, as it was then known. He was a great theorist: his Theory of Political Economy (1871) was a major work of economic theory and helped establish him as a leader in the then widely developing but not new approach of marginal utility economics. He combined theoretical, institutional, and historical analysesin effect amplifying Malthusian population theoryin The Coal Question (1885), concluding that the future of this then-basic industry was bleak, and therefore so was the British economy that was so dependent on coal. He engaged in statistical analyses in a number of fields, perhaps most notably in the study of business cycles, in which he related periodicity to sun-spot phenomena. He studied the institutions of money and credit in a manner that enriched monetary theory, e.g., Money and the Mechanism of Exchange (1875); (see also the edited volume, Investigations in Currency and Finance [1884]). He worked in epistemology and philosophy of science, authoring Pure Logic, or the Logic of Quality apart from Quantity (1863) and The Principles of Science: A Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method (1874). He examined the problems of social change in Methods of Social Reform and Other Papers (1883). And he tackled the great problem of Victorian Britain, the social question, that of the position of labour and the relation of the state to labourthe book herein reissuedin a manner which combined historical, institutional, and theoretical acumen with a minimum of manifest ideological bias. It is difficult to find another economist of his period who wrote so deeply on so many different subjects, who deployed such a variety of investigational techniques, and who both understood and advanced our understanding of the epistemological limits of the varied works of science. For Jevons, it was only pure economic theory, not economics as a whole, that comprised the study of the mechanics of utility. He understood that economic phenomena and performance were institutionally and historically grounded, such that pure economic theory had to be applied, combined with other techniques of analysis, when economists came to the study of real-world arrangements and problems. He sharedand, more important, demonstratedthe view of his great English contemporary, Alfred Marshall, that economics was an engine of inquiry, a set of tools with which one studied the economy, not a definition of economic reality itself.

Thus, the entry on Jevons as an Economic Theorist in The New Palgrave correctly identifies the areas of his theoretical contributions: (1) Mathematics, Utilitarianism and Methodology, (2) The Theory of Exchange, (3) The Theory of Labour and Exchange-with-Production, (4) The Theory of Rent, (5) The Theory of Capital and Interest, and (6) Distribution and Value: Further Considerations. But, as the foregoing paragraph indicates, Jevons was much more than a pure theorist. He was a political economist, an economic sociologist, in short, someone who understood that logic and empiricism have epistemological groundings and credentials but that their value in practice was in the manifold ways they could be combined in serious study.

Jevons accomplished all this during a life that lasted only 47 years. He began as a chemist and mathematician, taking a position at age 19 as an assayer in Australia, where he studied first botany and meteorology and then social and economic questions. Returning to England in 1859 after five years, he was given a junior position as a tutor in chemistry in Owens College, Manchester. He soon published a seminal work on mathematical economic theory and another on symbolic logic. He worked later on a logic machine, a precursor to the computer. In 1866 he was made Cobden Professor of Logic, Mental and Moral Philosophy at Owens College. In 1872 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 1876 he moved to University College, London as Professor of Political Economy. He died in 1882 from drowning while swimming on a vacation.