Economists developed the concept of ‘marginal utility’ in the late-nineteenth century within several different ‘schools’ of economics. Their ideas have been seen as sufficiently similar that historians of economics have sometimes taken this to be a case of simultaneous discovery - by four different economists (Menger, Clark, Jevons and Walras) in four separate countries (Austrian, America, Britain and France). They are thought to have developed this notion out of an older tradition of thinking about ‘use-value’, and this may account for why the similarities in their versions stood out for later commentators. Although they used the same labels, their accounts of utility were sufficiently different to make them conceptually distinct. These four versions were each associated with different characteristics of individual and social behaviour, which had salience for the theoretical context in which they were embedded. These characteristics are best revealed, and so traced, not in debates between the economists but rather in the separate narratives that they each told, first in introducing their version of ‘marginal utility’, and then in developing the characteristics of their concepts. This comparison explores how such late-nineteenth century economists’ narratives provided not only the wrapping, but much of the substantive content and format of their concepts-in-development, as well as carrying important implications for the mode of reasoning thought allowable in using their different versions of the concept.
