Hunting a precursor: The limits of Mountifort Longfield on utility and value

Mountifort Longfield's Lectures on Political Economy has generally been characterised as a highly original precursor of the late-nineteenth-century marginalist economic framework. Focussing on Longfield's discussion of value and utility, this paper shows that he was actually using a variant of the Classical framework that was quite different from that of marginalism. Far from exhibiting any substantive originality, the analysis owed a good deal to texts such as J. R. McCulloch's Principles of Political Economy. In explaining why the marginalist precursor characterisation is incompatible with the terms of Longfield's analysis, the paper also considers some difficulties that follow using the category of a precursor in constructing histories of economics.