1. THE MARGINAL REVOLUTION IN ECONOMICS The 'marginal revolution' occurred in the 1870s. It is associated with the names of Stanley JEVONS (mentioned already), Carl Menger (1840-1921) and Léon Walras (1834- 1910). True, as Meek reminds us (1972: 83- 4), it was not as revolutionary as its authors and many after them assumed. Mill's prior reformulation of value predated it by several decades. But there is no doubt that the marginalists sealed, and lent academic respectability to, the subjective turn in economics and beyond.utility , a subjective, psychological category (cf. Jevons on 'pleasure and pain' as the drivers of economic processes). Thus the focus moved from the sphere of production to the sphere of exchange; it envisioned a theory of distribution (of income) 'entirely within the circle of market relations', by seeing income as remuneration of what Walras called the productive services or factors of production , without relying on any sociological datum (Dobb, 1972a: 205-6).The marginalists as we saw were concerned with the advancing labour movement and Marxism, the critique and culminating result of classical political economy. But it will be remembered that they also specifically adopted the perspective of the stock-owning financier, whose vantage point they generalised as theory. As absentee owners and title holders not directly involved in production, the rentiers welcomed a vision of economics which concentrates on maximising returns, without any concern about how these are generated. There were other forces at work when marginalism emerged, such as a slowdown in the 1870s which placed scarcity at the centre of attention. Meek (1972: 89) therefore rejects Bukharin's (1972) association of marginalism with the rentier perspective. But the slowdown was overcome in the 20th century, whilst the perspective of the inactive owner has proved an enduring characteristic of capitalism. Specifically, the rentiers welcomed the idea that their incomes should be considered as an equally honourable source of revenue as that gained by work. 'The essence of interest is not exploitation', Böhm-Bawerk wrote; it is 'an entirely normal phenomenon', an 'economic necessity' that even a socialist society would have to respect (quoted in Dobb, 1972b: 60).
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