Little has come down to us about the bachelor who spent a life in obscurity.
We do not even know what he looked like. Most of what we know about him we owe to Leon Walras (1885 [1952]). William Stanley Jevons draws Walras’s attention to Gossen in a letter and in the second edition of The Theory of Political Economy (1879) he mentions several precursors of his own ideas and of the use of mathematics in economics, including Gossen’s Entwickelung der Gesetze des menschlichen Verkehrs, und der daraus flieβenden Regeln fur menschliches Handeln (1854).
He rightly calls Gossen’s “fundamental theory even more general and thorough” than his own (Jevons 1879: xxxviii). Walras gets hold of Gossen’s book, is deeply impressed by it and seeks to learn more about the “economiste inconnu”. He contacts Gossen’s nephew, Hermann Kortum, a professor of mathematics, who provides him with information about his uncle, on the basis of which Walras publishes a paper in the Journal des economistes, in which he calls Gossen “one of the most remarkable economists that has ever lived” (Walras 1885 [1952]: 71). For details of Gossen’s life, see Blum (n.d.) and Georgescu-Roegen (1983).Heinrich Wilhelm Joseph Hermann Gossen was born on 7 September 1810 into a family of civil servants in Duren near Cologne, at the time a part of the Napoleonic Imperium. His father worked as a tax collector for the French administration and later leased and managed a manor estate, which yielded the family a decent income and wealth. His mother was a devout Catholic who educated her children strictly according to her religious faith. Gossen’s reaction was to become a life-propagating hedonist with a distinctive anticlerical inclination.
His father pushed his son to embark on a career in the civil service. Gossen studied law, without much enthusiasm, in Bonn and Berlin, and is reported to have read writings by Jeremy Bentham and a widely used economics textbook by Karl Heinrich Rau.
In late 1834 he became a law clerk in Cologne. For years he fails to get promoted and was removed to other posts, because he did not take his profession seriously and spent more time in pubs than in his office. Apparently he followed the maxim he was to formulate in his book: “Man should organize his life so that his total life pleasure becomes a maximum,’ (Gossen 1983: 5, original emphasis). In 1847 he resigned from office thus pre-empting being given a dishonourable discharge. This happened shortly after his father had passed away and spared the son embarrassing explanations for his failure. Gossen inherited a substantial fortune, which allowed him to live on a private income together with his two sisters, who looked after him. He founded an insurance company with a Belgian, but soon withdrew his capital from it. He had by then firmly decided to write down ideas he had developed over the years and which he considered to be epochal. He was convinced that their publication would make him famous and gain him an academic career. In January 1853 he finished his work, but was unable to find a publisher. He finally selfpublished the manuscript at his own expense. Entwickelung der Gesetze appeared in summer 1854; it was the only work Gossen would ever publish. In the same year he fell ill with jail-fever, which permanently damaged his health.The fate of his book did not cheer him up. Only ten copies were sold and for about two decades the scientific community took no notice of it. It was as if the book had never been written. Shortly before his death he withdrew the unsold copies from the publisher. On 13 February 1858 a pulmonary tuberculosis carried off the enfeebled Gossen at the age of 47 in Cologne. The harbinger of the principle of pleasure maximization died disappointed and bitter. All his insights into the “true nature of man” were of little help to him. If only he had anticipated the fame that would be bestowed on his book long after his death!