Practically every scholar who is concerned with the work of Francis Ysidro Edgeworth (1845-1926) feels compelled to preface discussion with some sort of apologia or rationalization. This tendency first surfaced in the context of an abortive attempt to get him elected to the British Royal Society, and things have not improved since his demise.

Philip Mirowski contends that the bulk of these compulsive apologies derive from a single source, namely, the pervasive contemporary lack of interest in the intellectual trajectory of Edgeworth's career. Mirowski's introductory essay, in conjunction with the selection of Edgeworth's texts, serve to document a reevaluation, one that aims to recognize him as the dean of the second generation of neoclassical economists.

By bringing together the two sides of Edgeworth's vast oeuvre, and by situating Edgeworth's statistical and economic writings in the late-Victorian intellectual context, Mirowski demonstrates that Edgeworth was clearly superior in intellectual tenor to the rest of his cohort of second-generation neoclassicals, who have garnered more than their fair share of attention and lionization by historians of economic thought.