No One Familiar with the Primary Literature Can Doubt that Carl Menger's Treatment of the Structure of Wants in Relation to Evaluation Was More Profound and More Penetrating Than That of Walras and That of Jevons

Carl Menger clearly stands apart from the other two reputed founders of the modern marginal utility theory. Menger, of course, deserves to be celebrated no less than his two famous contemporaries as the discoverer of a method of incorporating utility and scarcity into a novel, pathbreaking explanation of value. In fact, so impressive was Menger’s performance that Stigler judges Menger’s theory “greatly superior to that of Jevons”  and Georgescu-Roegen deplores the placing of Menger “by almost every historian on a lower level than either Walras or Jevons.” Von Hayek goes so far as to hold that Menger’s Grundsätze der Volkswirschaftslehre [Principles of Economics] “provided a much more thorough account of the relations between utility, value and price, than is found in any of the works of Jevons and Walras.” No one familiar with the primary literature can doubt for a moment that Menger’s treatment of the structure of wants in relation to evaluation was more profound and more penetrating not only than that of Walras who evinced no particular interest in such questions, but also than that of Jevons to whom the theory was, however, conceived on the analogy of a mechanical balance of physical forces, whereas Menger’s theory was adorned with only one mechanical metaphor and that in the course of an argument purporting to prove that it is a mistake to regard “the magnitude of price as the essential feature of exchange.”

--William Jaffé, “Menger, Jevons and Walras De-Homogenized,” Economic Inquiry 14, no. 4 (December 1976): 518-519.