A Similar Theory, but Two Irreconcilable Philosophies
Despite Oules’s attempt, the Ecole de Lausanne’s influence on economics lies in a general economic equilibrium formulation that is independent and free from institutions and politics.
Thus, the initial Walrasian research programme to find a scientific solution to the social question, as well as Pareto’s opening to sociology in a process of successive approximations, got lost along the way. Although both one and the other, each in their own ways, were certain that a scientific approach to the general equilibrium could not be isolated; that the economics is not self-sufficient in itself, the legacy that economics has metabolized has leaned towards an opposite direction: towards a self-sufficient disciplinary theory. In contrast, though these two authors agree neither on the use of mathematics nor on the epistemological status of the general economic equilibrium, it is a specific use of mathematics and a particular meaning of the general economic equilibrium that has been kept by the discipline as constituting the Ecole de Lausanne’s characteristic features. So, when we change our point of view, leaving the legacy aside to inquire about these two authors’ works, the very definition of the school proves problematic.