Other histories

Beyond national traditions, the Ecole de Lausanne’s theoretical contributions raised expectations, and became the subject of refinement and debates throughout the past century.

Thus, many economists have also considered the general equilibrium as the stable foundation of a future dynamics theory.

In Pareto’s version, with its ordinal concept of utility and its optimum notion, the general equilibrium was mobilized in debates on welfare economics, until Arrow’s impossibility theorem (1951), while the abandoning of produced capital goods operated in the Manuel became, indirectly, the focus point of the debate on capital between the two Cambridges.

Finally, the issue of integrating money to the general equilibrium was raised upon the foundations provided by the Walras theories of money, with a genealogy leading up to Frank Horace Hahn’s conjecture, through Arthur W. Marget and Don Patinkin.

Ultimately, the Ecole de Lausanne’s central legacy might well prove to be its general equilibrium, available in two great intersecting histories: a neo-Walrasian narrative that draws support from Mathematisches Kolloquium; and a Paretian background, drawing from the Kreis. However, the Ecole de Lausanne, but also the general economic equilib­rium, were initially much more than issues focusing on economic variables interdepend­encies and on the mathematization of economics.