The Differences between Menger and Gossen, Jevons, and Walras Play a Major Role in the Development of Austrian Economics

By following Gossen, Jevons and Walras developed a marginal-utility theory of prices that was markedly less successful at describing observed reality than was Menger’s marginal-value approach. The differences between Menger on the one hand, and Gossen, Jevons, and Walras on the other, might seem arcane, but they came to play a major role in the development of Austrian economics, and it is against this background that one must appreciate the significance of Mises’s contributions.

Jevons’s marginal utility thus played structurally the same role that marginal value played in Menger’s theory—it delivered an explanation of market prices—but where marginal utility explains the price of a good by the good’s direct impact on human feelings, Menger’s marginal value explains the price of a good by how the good ranks in importance compared to other goods, according to the needs of the individuals involved in the pricing process.

--Jörg Guido Hülsmann, Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007), 129, 132.