I was asked by a friend, but I couldn’t give a sure answer.
Mises wrote about value rankings being not addable or subtractable in 1912. He used the word preference and human action in 1933.
Bohm-Bawerk meant the same thing as non-addable preferences in capital and interest. But who introduced the modern terminology of ordinal values used just about everywhere?
Menger still had cardinal utility (he had a chart with relative numerical values).
I heard Cuhel had ordinal utility, but anyone else, earlier?
Who popularized preference ranking such as A P B P C P D P…P Z
What you speak of is known as ordinal utility, as opposed to cardinal utility (which allows for adding/subtracting of utility curves. This essay should answer your question:
Anywhere else to get this article (anyone have it )?
My university has access to so many useless publications, and at the same time apparently misses some important journals. Anyone run into this where they study?
The Austrians here might disagree, but I think most mainstream historians of economic thought would say that Vilfredo Pareto was the first one who tried to purge economics of cardinal utility (in favor of ordinal preference functions).
Edit: As far as Pareto, I agree with you; he was too far similar to Gossen, since Pareto followed Walras.
Gossen was genius, insofar as he referred to marginal quantities in an ordinal way insofar as geometric (without scale and without specifying any particular shape of curves, except that they decrease). Walras rewrote his own book after Jevons told him about Gossen.
A shame about Jevons though. His theory of symbolic logic would have been perfect for ordinal analysis. But he was strictly cardinal: Edwin Cannan commented once about Jevon’s paradox of infinite cardinal utility for subsistence diet of bread (because of integral).
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