Hermann Heinrich Gossen

Hermann Heinrich Gossen (born September 7, 1810 in Düren , † February 13, 1858 in Cologne ) was a Prussian lawyer , royal Prussian government assessor, who wrote with his book Development of the Laws of Human Intercourse and the Rules for Human Action gave a revolutionary new meaning to the terms value , price and utility . It is the most important forerunner of the marginal utility school , which replaced classical economics in the second half of the 19th century.

Life

Gossen was the son of the tax collector Georg Joseph Gossen (born December 15, 1780 in Düren; † October 7, 1847 in Cologne) and his wife Maria Anna Mechthildis nee Scholl (born February 22, 1768 in Aachen; † June 29, 1833 in Muffendorf) born. At that time, Düren was under French occupation . The parents moved to Muffendorf near Bonn in 1824 in order to manage the Muffendorf estate, now the Siegburger Hof. Gossen initially tried to sell insurance. After studying in Bonn , he worked for a few years as a civil servant in the Prussian civil service and retired in 1847. From that time on he lived in Cologne until the end of his life.

In his book Development of the Laws of Human Intercourse, and the Rules for Human Action Flowing from it , which appeared in Braunschweig in 1854 , he used mathematical methods to present his theories on marginal utility and formulated the two Gossen laws that made him an important precursor of the Marginal utility school in the economy and thus for the neoclassical in general.

It is worth mentioning that at that time a mathematical consideration of economic relationships was not very common. Probably because of its complexity, his book did not find a following during his lifetime and was considered lost for a long time after his death. Only a few copies have survived today. Nevertheless, Gossen must have known the importance of his idea; he even compared them with the Copernican heavenly laws .

After 1870, works by Léon Walras , Carl Menger and William Stanley Jevons appeared almost simultaneously , which also presented marginal utility theory. While there was still an argument about who discovered it first, a colleague from Jevons managed to find out that Gossen had actually been the first. Gossen's achievement was recognized and made more understandable by less math. Due to the fact that Gossen's achievements were only known decades after his death, little was known about his life story at first. Léon Walras found his closest living relative in Gossen's nephew, Hermann Kortum , and published his information in 1885 in the Journal des économistes. Correspondence in this regard was published in 1965 by William Jaffé. A detailed evaluation of primary sources was only made in 1931 by Robert Blum.

The city of Düren put a memorial plaque in memory of Gossen on the site of the house where he was born in the war at Steinweg 9 . In 1970 a street was named after him. See plaques and monuments on houses in Düren .

Hermann Heinrich Gossen was a nephew of the later district president of Cologne, Franz Heinrich Gossen .

Fonts

• Development of the laws of human intercourse and the rules for human action that flow from them . Friedrich Vieweg & Son, Braunschweig 1854 ( digitized version )

Literature (selection)

• Friedrich Behrens : Hermann Heinrich Gossen or the birth of the “scientific apologetics” of capitalism . Bibliographical Institute, Leipzig 1949
• Karl Robert Blum: Hermann Heinrich Gossen - An investigation into the origin of his teaching . Giessen 1931
• Klaus Hagendorf: A Critique of Gossen's Fundamental Theorem of the Theory of Pleasure .
• William Jaffé (Ed.): Correspondence of Léon Walras and related papers . 3 volumes. North-Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam 1965 (publication of Walras' autobiography and correspondence).
• Oskar Kraus :  Gossen, Hermann Heinrich . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 55, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1910, pp. 483-488.
• Heinz D. Kurz : Who was Hermann Heinrich Gossen (1810–1858), namesake of one of the prizes of the Verein für Socialpolitik? In: Schmollers Jahrbuch , 129, 2009, 3.
• Heinz Kurz: Economics as a true religion . In: FAZ , October 25, 2010, p. 10
• Walter Laufenberg : The calculation of happiness - The life of Hermann Heinrich Gossen . Munich 2012
• Alexander Mahr:  Gossen, Hermann Heinrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 6, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1964, ISBN 3-428-00187-7 , p. 649 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Hermann Riedle: Hermann Heinrich Gossen: 1810–1858. A pioneer of modern economic theory . Winterthur 1953
• Léon Walras : Un économiste inconnu: Hermann-Henri Gossen . In: Journal des économistes , Vol. 30, No. 4/1885, pp. 68–90 ( digitized version )

Web links

• Literature by and about Hermann Heinrich Gossen in the catalog of the German National Library
• Death certificate Hermann Heinrich Gossen
• Death certificate Georg Joseph Gossen
• Death note Georg Joseph Gossen