Hermann Heinrich Gossen

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Hermann Heinrich Gossen (7 September 1810 in Düren – 13 February 1858 in Cologne) was a Prussian economist. In his book Die Entwicklung der Gesetze des menschlichen Verkehrs und der daraus fließenden Regeln für menschliches Handeln (The Development of the Laws of Human Intercourse and the Consequent Rules of Human Action), he was the first to elaborate a general theory of marginal utility. (A special-case formulation of this theory was earlier stated and applied to peculiar problems in the work of Daniel Bernoulli and of Gabriel Cramer; and an explicit statement of the general theory had been made by William Forster Lloyd.)

Gossen studied in Bonn under the Napoleonic French occupation, then worked in the Prussian administration until retiring in 1847, after which he sold insurance until his death.

Die Entwicktlung, published in Braunschweig in 1854, was poorly received, as Gossen wrote it in a dense, heavily mathematical style which was quite unpopular at the time. Although Gossen himself declared that his work was comparable in its significance to the innovations of Copernicus, few others agreed; most copies of the book were destroyed and, today, only a few original copies exist.

In the 1870s, Leon Walras, Carl Menger, and William Stanley Jevons each reintroduced the theory of marginal utility. During discussions of which of those three had been the first to formulate the theory, a colleague of Jevons discovered a copy of Die Entwicktlung.