Even before opening the book jacket, one has the sense that this assessment of William Stanley Jevons will be different from the previous three books on this remarkable man (by Harro Maas, Sandra Peart, and myself respectively). Bert Mosselmans has chosen a portrait that captures the mature Jevons, plumper, bearded, with that look of contentment worn by happily married men. After a melancholy childhood and a string of mental illnesses among members of his immediate family (his mother died when he was ten), Jevons finally found personal peace in his late thirties only to drown at age forty-six. The image used here is a striking contrast from the more commonly used one of the young Jevons with a haunting and inquisitive look.
This book is a collection of previously published articles, with some minor modifications (not enough in my view). Three of the chapters are co-authored (one with Michael White, another with George Chryssides, and yet another with Ernest Mathijs), but the bulk of them stem from Dr. Mosselman's prizewinning doctoral dissertation. There is little effort made to join the chapters together into a coherent monograph, but nonetheless, this is an important contribution because of the range of topics and because of some foray into topics hitherto neglected. The four most original chapters address Jevons on logic, on music theory, on institutions, and on religion. If there were any prior doubts about Jevons's remarkable polymathic abilities, this book puts them to rest.
Dr. Mosselmans has a chapter on Jevons as part of the canon of the history of economics. It maintains that David Ricardo was not successfully buried, and that Jevons's antipathy to John Stuart Mill was also superficial. He thus downplays the thesis of a Jevonian revolution but without engaging the existing literature on the subject—Blaug, Hutchison, and Mirowski for a start. I wish he had used his knowledge of Jevons to make more substantial claims. In any event, the overarching claim that Jevons was neither particularly radical nor truly neoclassical is not sufficiently justified to be persuasive. The discussions of Jevons on logic, statistics, and institutions in the ensuing chapters tend to bolster the striking originality of his work and leave one puzzled as to why Jevons was portrayed as relatively conservative in this earlier framing chapter.
The last chapter has an appendix that reproduces a small segment of the music manuscript found in the John Rylands Library of Manchester (the entire manuscript is some fifty pages). It is a good instance of the interest Jevons had about the human condition writ large. Mosselmans advances the view that Jevons appraised music from a functionalist standpoint. He also used music as a window for grappling with the mind-body problem, insofar as it links reason (the science of sounds) with feelings (aesthetics). Clearly music tugged Jevons in the direction of a deep conviction that there was considerable objectivity and uniformity to the inner feelings of humankind and hence potential for a science of man.
