Standard histories of economics usually treat the "marginal revolution" of the midnineteenth century as both supplanting the "classical" economics of Smith and Ricardo and as advancing the idea of economics as a mathematical science. The marginalists - especially Jevons and Walras - viewed...

Although Cournot's mathematical economics was generally neglected until the mid- 1870s, he was taken up and carefully studied by the Scientific Club of Cambridge, Massachusetts even before his "discovery" by Walras and Jevons. The episode is reconstructed from fragmentary manuscripts of the...