ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Some notes on Gossen’s ‘submerged and forgotten’ approach to consumption and time
Author: Nisticò Sergio
Hermann Heinrich Gossen (1810-1858) – a civil servant who, in 1854, published at his expense his book Entwickelung der Gesetze des menschlichen Verkehrs und der daraus fließenden Regeln für menschliches Handeln – has traditionally been considered a forerunner of the neoclassical theory of consumption based on the law of diminishing marginal utility. It is only with the long-awaited publication, in 1983, of the English translation of Gossen’s book, that his editor, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, started to see in The Laws of Human Relations and the Rules of Human Action Derived Therefrom the roots of a wholly different theory of consumption in which the flow of calendar time time plays a crucial and non-trivial role. Following Georgescu-Roegen, the paper shows how Gossen’s approach to consumption choices can be represented in terms of time-consuming activities, wherein the goods and services to be bought on the marketplace are the inputs of those activities. The paper also argues that going back to Gossen, i.e. to a ‘what-shall-I-do’ approach (Steedman 2001) to individual choices, paves the way to a social and psychological dimension of consumption that economic theory should definitely address. Besides giving some hints about the problems to be addressed by a possible economic theory of ‘activities’, the paper finally discusses the issue of the extent to which there is room for ‘optimization’– that Gossen somehow postulated – within a non-marginalist theory of consumption.
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