iom in his Outline of 1836. The biological imperative lapsed from attention when the first generation of marginalists, led by Jevons and Menger, with Walras soon to follow, thought it unscientific to explain or justify tastes. It reemerged a century later in bioeconomics, much of which looked for economic

omist-cum-sociologist who lived from 1848 to 1923. An engineer by training, he started his varied career managing coal mines and later succeeded Léon Walras as the chair of political economy at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. His seminal work, Cours d’economie politique, included a then little-