A Brief Retrospective on Measuring Utility in Traditional Microeconomics

Economic science is always in search for a more rigorous, objective and accurate methods that could provide economics with a more elevated status among other sciences. In many cases the attempts to assume empirical methods specific to natural sciences (such as observation and experiment) were less able to lead the economic thought towards significant results. Nevertheless the use of mathematical language in economics as a formalizing method has proved to be successful. The large scale spreading of mathematics among economists overlaps with the so-called marginalist revolution. The proponents of marginalist theory made appeal mathematical language in order to explain and measure utility. In this context, the present paper attempts to analyze how the formalizing method provided by mathematics altered the traditional microeconomics. Thus, the paper provides a brief retrospective on the use of mathematics in utilitarian approach with a special focus on the debates over the measurability of utility.