This is intended as an essay in historiography – to illustrate how the widely disseminated practice of lumping Menger, Jevons and Walras together under one caption has grossly distorted the history of their contributions to economic analysis. The usual caption is, of course, “The Marginal Revolution of the 1870s,” a subject amply treated elsewhere. The question I propose to raise here is not whether there ever was a “Marginal Revolution” in the proper sense of the term, but whether the use of any single appelation to designate the three “revolutionary” innovations of the 1870s obscures precisely those differences between them which the passage of time has revealed more important than anything they may have had in common.

Exactly when and where the name “Marginal Revolution” made its first appearance I do not know. For present purposes it suffices to take Schumpeter's History of Economic Analysis of 1954 as the starting point, for in that treatise the name was not merely used as a tag, but was discussed from the standpoint of its appropriateness. Already in 1953, T. W. Hutchison had written apropos of Gossen and Jevons, “The playing up or playing down of the revolutionary newness of a writer's contribution is, of course, often largely a matter of temperament and intellectual vested interest.” Mark Blaug boldly headed Chapter 8 of his Economic Theory in Retrospect of 1962, “The Marginal Revolution,” but added the caution, “To speak of a marginal revolution is in itself somewhat misleaing.”