From Paris to Lausanne

Leon Walras was the son of Auguste Walras (1801-1866), a professor of rhetoric, then a school inspector, but also an economist. In preparing his first book, De la nature de la richesse et de l’origine de la valeur (1831), in which he based the the­ory of value of commodities on scarcity [rarete], or limitation in quantity, Auguste Walras took a strong interest in the Saint-Simonian ideas spread through public lectures and pamphlets and was a diligent reader of the newspaper Le Globe.

After obtaining a Bachelor of Arts and Sciences degree, Leon Walras took the competitive exams for entrance to the Parisian grandes ecoles. In 1853 he failed the Ecole Polytechnique exam, but in 1854 he was admitted as an external student at the Ecole des Mines. Unfortunately, his grades were insufficient and in 1856 he was definitely excluded from this Ecole (see Dockes and Potier 2001). In fact, he neglected his studies in preparation for an engineering career and turned to litera­ture, philosophy and art criticism. He even wrote a novel, Francis Sauveur, pub­lished in 1858. In his “Notice autobiographique” (1909a, 12), Leon Walras recalled that during a night walk in the summer of 1858, his father had vigorously asserted

DOI: 10.4324/9780429202407-7 to him that two great tasks remained to do during the nineteenth century: “to com­plete the creation of history” and, above all, “to begin to create social science”.

In 1859, Leon Walras wrote his first book on economics, a refutation of Pierre- Joseph Proudhon’s ideas, L’Economie politique et la justice (1860). In 1860, he took part in the Congres international de l’impot [International Congress on Taxa­tion] held in Lausanne (Switzerland), where his interventions were highly noted. In the following years, he gradually developed his famous tripartition of “political and social economy” - pure economics, social economics and applied economics - as well as a “general theory of society” (or the “pure” component of his “social economics”), which would be developed in public lectures published under the title Recherche de l’ideal social (1867-68). In 1862, he was employed in the sec­retariat of the Compagnie de chemin de fer du Nord, then between 1864 and 1868 he became involved in the Parisian cooperative movement. Then, together with Leon Say, Jean-Baptiste Say’s grandson, he launched the Caisse d’escompte des associations populaires de credit, de production et de consommation, of which he became managing director, and he ran a newspaper devoted to the promotion of cooperation: Le Travail. Organe international des interets de la classe laborieuse. Revue du mouvement cooperatif. But these experiences ended in failure. In the autumn of 1870, thanks to the help of Jules Ferry and Louis Ruchonnet, minister of public education of the Canton de Vaud, he succeeded in a competition for the chair of political economy at the Law faculty of the Lausanne Academy (which was to obtain the status of university in 1890), where he taught until 1892.

Leon Walras was the heir to a French tradition dating back to the eighteenth century.

Leon Walras’s first master was his father, from whom he largely adopted the economic terminology and the project of repurchase of land by the State as a solu­tion to the social question. His second master was Antoine-Augustin Cournot, for demand as a continuous and decreasing function of price and the different equilib­rium situations presented in the Recherches sur les principes mathematiques de la theorie des richesses (1838). However, in his research into the application of math­ematics to political economy, Walras was interested in the general equilibrium, that is to say, the general interdependence between markets and the establishment of an equilibrium between prices and quantities supplied and demanded on all the markets, expressed through systems of simultaneous equations.

At the Lausanne Academy, Leon Walras taught law students pure econom­ics, applied economics and social economics - what he considered to be the three branches of economic science. This is a very illuminating example of the integration of research and teaching. The first edition of the Elements d’economie politique pure was published in two parts (1874 and 1877). Walras published a sec­ond edition in 1889. On retiring in 1892, he wanted to draw on his lectures in social and applied economics to publish Elements d’economie sociale and Elements d’economie politique appliquee, to form a trilogy with the Elements d’economie politique pure. However, he gave up on this project due to fatigue, instead bring­ing together old and new works and articles in the collections Etudes d’economie sociale (1896d) and Etudes d’economie politique appliquee (1898).¹ The lessons in social and applied economics were not published until 1996, forming volume XII of the Euvres economiques completes of Auguste and Leon Walras. However, our author succeeded in publishing a third (1896), then a fourth edition (1900) of the Elements d’economie politique pure. A final, posthumous edition appeared in 1926.^{[103] [104]}

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