Valeria Mosini (Ed.). Equilibrium in Economics. Scope and Limits

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Valeria Mosini (ed.). Equilibrium in Economics. Scope and Limits (Routledge Frontiers of Economies, No. 83). London: Routledge. 2007. Pp. xxiii + 284. ISBN 0415391377. 75 [pounds sterling].

Equilibrium is discerned by William Stanley Jevons (Theory of Political Economy, chapter 4) to be a final conception in the abstract science which elsewhere he calls the mechanics of industry. So Professor Alfred Marshall, indicating in the preface to his Principles of Economics the leading ideas by which he was inspired, says 'the demand for a thing is a continuous function, of which the "marginal" increment is a stable equilibrium balanced against the correspondent increment of its cost of production'. Professor Marshall employs the term equilibrium amount as the amount of the commodity produced in a unit of time when the demand for and the supply of that commodity are in equilibrium, and when there is therefore no tendency in the quantity produced in a particular time to increase or diminish. The term equilibrium price is similarly used to denote the price of the equilibrium amount in the same circumstances.

The above constitutes the complete article, 'Equilibrium', as included in the first edition of Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy (London, 1894, I, p. 749) written by the advocate, Mark G. Davidson. It firmly associates the concept with what is now called the 'marginal revolution' in England, more specifically with two of its key figures, …