Heirs
A few individuals have enjoyed close proximity with the Ecole de Lausanne founders, which make them their direct heirs.
Take Leon Winiarski, for example, a Polish sociologist and disgruntled Marxist, who was fascinated by the application of the mathematical method in political economy, and especially by the general economic equilibrium.
He defended a doctoral thesis on Russian finance at the University of Lausanne (1894), with Pareto as Examiner. As he shared much of the Walrasian social ideal, Winiarski attempted to disseminate the new theory, through his teaching activity at the University of Geneva, his multilingual publicist undertaking, and especially via his social mechanics (Winiarski 1967), which is a vast, unfinished attempt to extend the general economic equilibrium to a general equilibrium applied to all fields of social life.The Russian statistician and economist of Polish descent Ladislaus Bortkiewicz could be counted in the 1890s as one of the direct heirs of this Ecole de Lausanne, to such an extent that, as noted earlier, Walras thought he could make him his successor. However, his involvement in the construction of the general equilibrium boiled down to technical problems, which Bortkiewicz seemed to be more interested in than in the analysis of the general framework. What he would later remember about it was primarily the mathematical notion of interdependence of economic variables, which he used in other contexts without keeping the framework of the general equilibrium. Finally, Bortkiewicz’s most lasting contribution to the Ecole de Lausanne’s legacy may well be his role as a knowledge broker - in Berlin, where he had settled - between Lausanne and Russia, where a whole school of mathematical economists (Vladimir Karpovich Dmitriev, Evgeny Evgenievich Slutsky, Nikolay Nikolaevich Shaposhnikov and Leonid Naumovich Yurovsky) was influenced by the Walras and Pareto theories, from the early twentieth century until the mid-1920s, while participating early on in a neo-Ricardian revival. Soviet mathematician economists (Leonid Vital’evich Kantorovich, Vasily Serge’evich Nemchinov and Viktor Valentinovich Novozhilov) became their heirs, but reference to the Ecole de Lausanne was lost in the mean time.
Two of Vilfredo Pareto’s doctoral students worked on the theory of general equilibrium. Pierre Boven, one of the master’s faithful disciples, wrote an early history of the intellectual heritage of the Ecole de Lausanne, in his thesis entitled “Les applications mathematiques a l’economie politique” (“Mathematical applications to political economy”, 1912). Boven authored the French translation of Pareto’s Trattato di sociolo- gia generale (1917-19, translated as The Mind and Society), and also Roberto Murray’s (1920) volume, and later became Attorney General of the Canton of Vaud, and although he was repeatedly approached to deliver courses in sociology, Pareto’s sole local student departed from his master’s original concerns. Much less faithful to the master, Basile Samsonoff developed the theory of rent in the spirit of the Ecole de Lausanne, that is, as the difference between two successive general equilibriums. Little attention was paid to his thesis, “Esquisse d’une theorie generale de la rente” (“An outline of a general theory of rent”, 1912). Samsonoff joined the Russian mathematician economists, but his family’s staunch military tradition decided otherwise for him: he died on the battlefield during the First World War. Even if Marie Kolabinska’s sociology thesis on La circulation des elites en France (The Circulation of Elites in France, 1912) is included, Pareto was not the source of intense emulation in Lausanne.