ABSTRACT
The Historical School and the marginalists had a common point of departure: to reform political economy in order to rectify what they thought were the inadequacies of the classical school in general and Ricardianism in particular. However, although the historicists thought that one basic cause of the problems of classical political economy was the use of the Ricardian abstract deductive method, the marginalists thought this the most appropriate tool together with Bentham’s utilitarianism, which could be used as the basis for the total reconstruction of political economy. Section 2 examines how the ‘early’ marginalists, especially the troika of William Stanley Jevons (1835-82), Léon Walras (1834-1910) and Carl Menger (1840-1921), grounded the approach in explicit breaks with classical political economy, each in his own way.1
