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A Comment on Philip Mirowski's Analysis of Utility Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2009

Claude Mouchot
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Extract

In chapter 5 of his book More Heat Than Light (1989), Philip Mirowski mentions that the first neoclassical (W. S. Jevons, Leon Walras, Vilfredo Pareto, and Irving Fisher, but with the notable exception of Carl Menger) all referred to the analogy between their formulations and those of the physics of their day. Then he asserts, going beyond their statements on this matter, that the early neoclassical model was purely an analogical transposition of the model of the field theory of physics of the 1860s, which he calls “protoenergetics.” The latter implies a subject matter that is a mechanics of equilibrium and of reversible phenomena, and in which there is no question of the appearance of the notion of entropy.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , September 1998 , pp. 299 - 309
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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References

REFERENCES

Hands, D. Wade. 1993. “More Light on Integrability, Symmetry, and Utility,” in Marchi, Neil de, ed., Non-Natural Sciences: Reflecting on the Enterprise of More Heat than Light, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 118–30.Google Scholar
Mirowski, Philip. 1989. More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics and Physics as Nature's Economics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar