For reasons more political than economic, neoclassical theory displaced classical political economy in the 1870s, and has remained the dominant framework for conducting formal economic analysis ever since. The works of utilitarian social philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), were highly influential in the formation of early neoclassical economics. Bentham maintained that all human motivation could be reduced to a single principal: the individual's desire to maximize utility or satisfaction. Contrary to the class-conflict conclusions reached by classical political economy, utilitarianism espoused an economic doctrine of class harmony where the satisfaction of individual preferences informed all economic decisions. The appeal to class harmony resided in the "rational" notion that if capitalists and workers were brought to understand that they each received only a portion of what they had jointly created, then social justice would prevail. Several early attempts at constructing an economic theory of value and exchange on the basis of a utilitarian approach failed. Only with the separate publication of economic texts by William Stanley Jevons (1835-82) and Carl Menger in 1871, and by Leon Walras three year later, did neoclassical theory emerge as an internally coherent theoretical tradition. A short time later, the work of Alfred Marshall (1842-1924) provided additional support of neoclassical theory.
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