Retirement, relinquishing the triptych and the completion of pure economics

Walras’s health had not been good for some time, but it began to deteriorate and caused him to retire in 1892. This raised the matter of his succession to the chair of political economy.

Freed from the burden of teaching, Walras believed at first he would be able to com­plete his research programme by finalizing the triptych, but he had to give up. From the beginning of his lectures in Lausanne, Walras directed his teaching not only towards pure economics, but also to applied and social economics. As in the case of his pure economics lectures, these were to contribute to his fundamental works. He intended to complete his Elements d’economie politique pure with Elements d’economie politique appli- quee and Elements d’economie sociale, but these were eventually published in the form of incomplete Etudes. The publications in 1896 of Etudes d’economie sociale (Theorie de la repartition de la richesse sociale) and, two years later, of Etudes d’economie politique appliquee (Theorie de la production de la richesse sociale) included mostly previously published works.

At the time of the publication of the two Etudes, Walras developed his Elements; in the third edition, he added three appendices and moved four lessons, focusing on the theory of money, to the Etudes d’economie politique appliquee. His way of dealing with money in the Elements was increasingly akin to the classical dichotomy and, in parallel, the dis­turbing aspects (dynamic) were moved to applied political economics.

In the fourth edition, Walras introduced the tatonnement on bonds, and turned back to fixed production coefficients. It finally enabled him to confer its timeless character to his general economic equilibrium, and provided the ultimate response to Bertrand’s criti­cism. At the same time, it probably contributed to his intuition of the difficulty inherent to the heterogeneity of capital.

An “intestinal thrombophlebitis” got the better of him, while he lived in Tavel-sur- Clarens, on 5 January 1910, a few months after the Jubilee - a ceremony organized by the State Council of the Canton of Vaud for his fiftieth birthday as an economist. On this occasion, Walras had delivered a speech that was a tribute to the person who had made it possible for him to join the University of Lausanne, but, in many respects, it may be described as his scientific testament: “Ruchonnet et le socialisme scientifique”.