Edgeworth, Francis Ysidro

"This volume commences with two youthful monographs, Mathematical Psychics (1881), Edgeworth's best-known work, and New and Old Methods of Ethics (1879), which is reprinted for the first time. Both are complemented by extensive editorial notes. Edgeworth's mature views, however, are to be found in his lectures, journal articles and reviews. He himself edited the three volumes of his Papers Relating to Political Economy in 1925, a project which led to some surprising omissions. This volume includes the most significant articles not previously reprinted - among them his seminal work on the theory of banking and the application of mathematical theory to political economy, his reviews of Walras and Marshall, his lectures On the Relations of Political Economy to War (1915) and Equal Pay to Men and Women for Equal Work (1922), together with his most important contributions to Palgrave's Dictionary."--Jacket.

Practically every scholar who is concerned with the work of Francis Ysidro Edgeworth (1845-1926) feels compelled to preface discussion with some sort of apologia or rationalization. This tendency first surfaced in the context of an abortive attempt to get him elected to the British Royal Society, and things have not improved since his demise. Philip Mirowski contends that the bulk of these compulsive apologies derive from a single source, namely, the pervasive contemporary lack of interest in the intellectual trajectory of Edgeworth's career. Mirowski's introductory essay, in conjunction with the selection of Edgeworth's texts, serve to document a reevaluation, one that aims to recognize him as the dean of the second generation of neoclassical economists. By bringing together the two sides of Edgeworth's vast oeuvre, and by situating Edgeworth's statistical and economic writings in the late-Victorian intellectual context, Mirowski demonstrates that Edgeworth was clearly superior in intellectual tenor to the rest of his cohort of second-generation neoclassicals, who have garnered more than their fair share of attention and lionization by historians of economic thought.