University of Bonn. Photo: Daniel Tibi ( Dti ) | daniel-tibi.de, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:University-bonn_2005-11-18.jpg)
University of Bonn. Photo: Daniel Tibi ( Dti ) | daniel-tibi.de, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:University-bonn_2005-11-18.jpg)
Hermann Heinrich Gossen was a German economist and Prussian civil servant whose 1854 book developed a mathematical theory of consumption, value, and diminishing marginal utility. Largely ignored during his lifetime, his ideas were later recognized as an important anticipation of the marginalist economics associated with Jevons, Menger, and Walras.
Background
Gossen was born on September 7, 1810, in Düren in the Rhineland, then a region shaped by the political changes surrounding French and Prussian rule. His father, Georg Joseph Gossen, was a tax official, and his mother, Anna Mechtilde Scholl, came from Aachen. In 1824 the family moved to Muffendorf near Bonn, where his father managed an estate.
The family’s administrative background helped direct Gossen toward a government career, although his own interests included mathematics, music, and questions about social organization. He remained unmarried and spent the final years of his life in Cologne, where he died on February 13, 1858.
Education
Gossen studied law and public administration at the University of Bonn, with his university education beginning in 1829 and continuing through 1834. He also spent a period at the University of Berlin before returning to Bonn. The University of Bonn, founded in 1818, was one of the leading institutions of higher education in the Prussian Rhineland and combined legal, philosophical, and administrative study within the nineteenth-century German university tradition.
His studies were shaped by the expectations of a Prussian civil-service career, but they also exposed him to political economy and the mathematical treatment of social questions. His later economic work transformed these interests into an attempt to formulate general laws of human behavior and consumption.
Gossen entered the Prussian administration in 1834 as a government referendary in Cologne. The Prussian civil service was a central institution of nineteenth-century state administration, organized around legal training, examinations, and graduated official positions. He later served as a government assessor in Magdeburg from 1844 and in Erfurt from 1845.
He left government service in 1847 after the death of his father and subsequently devoted himself to economic writing and insurance schemes. In 1849 he helped establish an insurance company in Cologne with a Belgian associate, but withdrew from the venture the following year. His insurance work included efforts to apply mathematical reasoning to risks such as hail and livestock mortality.
Gossen’s principal intellectual achievement was Entwickelung der Gesetze des menschlichen Verkehrs, und der daraus fliessenden Regeln für menschliches Handeln, published in Braunschweig in 1854. Using mathematical analysis and a hedonistic conception of economic behavior, he argued that the additional satisfaction obtained from successive units of a good diminishes and examined how consumers allocate resources to maximize total satisfaction. These propositions later became associated with Gossen’s laws and were recognized as an important anticipation of marginal utility theory.
The book received little attention in Gossen’s lifetime, partly because German economics was dominated by the historical school and partly because of the work’s demanding mathematical presentation. Its importance was rediscovered in the later nineteenth century, when economists including William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, and Léon Walras independently developed marginalist theories.
Achievements
Gossen developed a mathematical theory of consumption and value in which the marginal utility of successive units of a good diminishes as consumption increases. This principle became a foundational element of later marginalist economics.
He formulated the condition that a consumer maximizes total satisfaction by allocating expenditure so that the marginal utility obtained from each good is balanced in relation to its price. This analysis anticipated a central result of modern consumer theory.
Although his economic work was largely ignored at the time of publication, Gossen was later recognized as an important precursor of the marginalist revolution associated with William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, and Léon Walras.
(The first English translation of Gossen's 1854 economic t...)
1983
Religion
Gossen was born into a Catholic family in the Rhineland. His later outlook became markedly distant from the strict Catholic upbringing associated with his mother, and he expressed anti-clerical views while developing a hedonistic approach to human conduct.
His economic theory treated pleasure, pain, consumption, and the pursuit of satisfaction as central subjects of social science. This orientation placed his work within the nineteenth-century European debate over utilitarianism and the possibility of explaining human action through systematic principles.
Views
Gossen's economic philosophy treated human action as directed toward the maximization of pleasure and the reduction of painful effort. In his analysis, the value of a good depended on its capacity to satisfy human wants and on the quantity already consumed, making diminishing marginal utility a central principle.
He extended this hedonistic framework beyond individual consumption to questions of exchange, production, labor, and social welfare. His approach anticipated the later marginalist effort to explain economic value through subjective utility and mathematically express the conditions under which satisfaction could be maximized.
Personality
Contemporary and later accounts describe Gossen as reserved and poorly suited to the routine of government service. His withdrawal from official employment and his sustained work on an ambitious mathematical economics manuscript indicate a strong commitment to his intellectual interests, although his book’s reception during his lifetime was disappointing.
Interests
Mathematics and insurance theory.
Music & Bands
Music was among Gossen’s documented personal interests.
Connections
Gossen was the son of Georg Joseph Gossen, a tax official, and Anna Mechtilde Scholl of Aachen. Hermann Kortum, a professor of mathematics in Bonn, was identified as Gossen’s nephew. Gossen remained unmarried.
Father:
Georg Joseph Gossen
A tax official and Gossen’s father.
Mother:
Anna Mechtilde Scholl
Gossen’s mother, who came from Aachen.
nephew:
Hermann Kortum
A professor of mathematics in Bonn and Gossen’s nephew.
References
Deutsche Biographie: Hermann Heinrich Gossen
Biographical reference covering Gossen’s family background, Catholic affiliation, Prussian administrative career, 1854 book, and posthumous rediscovery.
