Indeterminacy in Exchange: Disinterring Jevons’s Trading Bodies

Although W. S. Jevons’s use of the concept of a ‘trading body’ in his Theory of Political Economy has often been criticized as unsatisfactory, much of the subsequent commentary has obscured the role of the device in Jevons’s argument and the reason why he used it. It is shown here that the coherence of the argument depended on a peculiar claim Jevons made regarding the domain of his analysis of exchange. The claim was made to minimize the problem of commodity indivisibility which became important for Jevons following the debates over the laws of supply and demand which preceded the publication of the Theory .