Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Theory, Application And The Canon: The Case Of Mill And Jevons, Sandra J. Peart

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Whatever disputes remain about the nature and content of the "canon" of economics, it is widely accepted that the boundary of economic science was narrowed throughout the nineteenth century (Winch 1972). This chapter offers a partial explanation for that narrowing in the methodological developments that occurred during the second half of the century. For reasons of practicality in the face of pronounced "multiplicity of cause," John Stuart Mill called, In his 1836 Essay On the Definition of Political Economy; and on the Method of Investigation Proper to It, and again in his 1843 Logic, for a separate …

Sun Spots And Expectations: W. S. Jevons And The Theory Of Economic Fluctuations, Sandra J. Peart

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

W. Stanley Jevon’s statistical study of periodicity has received much scrutiny (Aldrich1987), but less attention has been given to his theoretical position on economic fluctuations, a circumstance which T.W. Hutchison justly finds surprising considering that “Jevons maintained that aggregate instability, and the distress it caused, presented profoundly serious problems, and devoted some of his most strenuous economic research to their explanation” (Hutchison 1988, p. 6). This paper takes up the challenge to examine the development of Jevon’s though on economic fluctuations from the early 1860s until his death in 1882.

I shall distinguish in what follows between Jevon’s “theory of …