Hermann Heinrich Gossen (7 September 1810 – 13 February 1858) was a German economist who is often regarded as the first to elaborate, in detail, a general theory of marginal utility.
Hermann's paternal grandfather, Arnold Winand Gossen, married Anna Cordula Schmitz on September 3, 1774 in Selgersdorf, Jülich, Prussia.
In this work, Gossen very explicitly develops general theoretical implications from a theory of marginal utility, to the extent that William Stanley Jevons (one of the preceptors of the Marginal Revolution) was later to remark that [I]t is quite apparent that Gossen has completely anticipated me as regards the general principles and method of the theory of Economics.
[11] In the early 1870s, William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, and Léon Walras each reintroduced the theory of marginal utility.
[13] In his introduction to the book, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, a prominent American economist (Distinguished Fellow of the American Economics Association), strongly supported Gossen’s vision, which stands in opposition to the neoclassical orthodoxy that utility (satisfaction) is properly identified with consumables in basic (utility) theory rather than consumption activity: Given that the only certain fact is the intensity of pleasure felt at an instant of time, the only epistemologically sound approach is to take intensity as the primary concept.
Gossen was among the first economists to argue that a centrally planned economy was unworkable:[14][15] Original: " … nur durch Feststellung des Privateigenthums der Maßstab gefunden wird zur Bestimmung der Quantität, welche den Verhältnissen angemessen am Zweckmäßigsten von jeden Gegenstand zu produciren ist.