The legacy

It is essentially outside Lausanne, by way of letters, that Walras as well as Pareto main­tained or even gave rise to, in the case of the founder, a network of correspondents inter­ested in their works.

Italy was the country offering the most open and benevolent reception to writings by Walras. There developed a network of correspondents interested in his work. Pareto can be included, although his interest in Walras was neither immediate - despite his friends’ insistence - nor disinterested. Maffeo Pantaleoni, Enrico Barone and Gustavo Del Vecchio were authors who interacted constructively with the Ecole de Lausanne, while others, such as Umberto Ricci, Enrico Leone, Luigi Amoroso, Guido Sensini and Stanislao Scalfati, often simply disseminated Pareto’s work, without actually contribut­ing to the development of the general equilibrium theory. In Spain, several attempts to introduce the general equilibrium were made. Among them can be included Antonio Flores de Lemus’s, who learned about the Walrasian general equilibrium under Lexis and Bortkiewicz, and tried to accommodate it to the national context (Astigarraga and Zabalza 2008). In Portugal, Antonio Horta Osorio wrote a handbook entitled A Mathematica na economia pura (1911) based on the Ecole de Lausanne, which was translated into French.

In France, the mathematization of political economy raised a problem: Walras was ostracized and the dissemination of the Ecole de Lausanne in the early twentieth century was rather subdued. Some books in French about mathematical political economy were nonetheless released before the Great War: by Emile Bouvier (1901), Hermann Laurent (1902), Antonio Horta Osorio (1913), Wladimir Zawadzki (1914) and Jacques Moret in 1915.

In Japan, Tokuzo Fukuda, Kinnosuke Otsuka, Ichiro Nakayama, Takuma Yasui and especially Yasuma Takata mix general equilibrium and sociology, while Michio Morishima and Takashi Negishi’s combinations of general equilibrium and Marxism have proved very successful (Misaki 2006).

In Sweden, Knut Wicksell (1893, 1898) used the general equilibrium equations and the Walras tatonnement, but his theoretical construction deviated from the latter when it came to thinking about the difference between real and monetary phenomena, where he mobilized Bohm-Bawerk and developed his own ideas. Gustav Cassel (1899), mean­while, achieved the feat of presenting different versions of the Walrasian general equilib­rium with much greater clarity than in the original - and in very few pages as well - but at the cost of great simplification. The general equilibrium as seen by Wicksell and Cassel left its mark through the School of Stockholm and its sequential analyses (Erik Lindahl, Gunnar Myrdal and Bertil Ohlin). However, more importantly, Wicksell and Cassel write in German, and this accounts for their predominant role in the dissemination of the general equilibrium (the same happened when their works were translated into English, but only later on).