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Professor Stigler on Dupuit and the Development of Utility Theory: Comment

George Stigler, in a now classic paper published in this Journal, unhesitatingly credited Jules Dupuit, a mid-nineteenth-century French engineer, with one of the first "nonadventitious" discussions of marginal utility (Stigler 1950, p. 313). Additionally, he found that Dupuit's "explicit formulation of the concept of consumer surplus is elegant." But Stigler was not so generous in dealing with Dupuit's cost-of-production theory (or lack of it); he commented that "Dupuit could not reach a complete theory of optimum prices because he did not devise a coherent theory of cost" (1950, p. 314). The purpose of the present note is to challenge the latter comment and the reasoning Stigler used to support it. Stigler extracted a passage from the Bernardi collection of Dupuit's writings (Dupuit 1934) to support his view, and he prefaces the quotation with the remark that "this [the failure to devise a coherent theory of cost] is illustrated by the following quotation in which price fluctuations are treated as exercises of arbitrary power" (Stigler 1950, p. 314, n. 36). The quotation at issue is the following: