Background
Léon Walras was born on 16 December 1834 in Évreux in Normandy. He was the son of the Auguste Walras, who was a school administrator and not a professional economist. Yet his economic thinking had a profound effect on his son.
(Elements of Pure Economics was one of the most influentia...)
Elements of Pure Economics was one of the most influential works in the history of economics, and the single most important contribution to the marginal revolution. Walras' theory of general equilibrium remains one of the cornerstones of economic theory more than 100 years after it was first published.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0415607310/?tag=2022091-20
(In his fourth edition of Elements of Theoretical Economic...)
In his fourth edition of Elements of Theoretical Economics (1900), León Walras introduced the device of written pledges to eliminate path dependency: sellers of products and services write out commitments to supply certain quantities at suggested prices with no commodities actually produced and supplied until a set of prices is found at which supply and demand are equal simultaneously in every market. This brought about very serious alterations to the character of the book. Unfortunately, these changes resulted in an incomplete, internally contradictory, and occasionally incoherent text. This translation, therefore, by two leading scholars of Leon Walras's work, Donald Walker and Jan van Daal, revisits the third edition of this seminal work, including Walras's brilliant explanation of his comprehensive model, with all its richness derived from reality. Growing research into Walras's research indicates that it was this third edition that contained his best theoretical research and a translation of this edition of the book is now a necessity.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1107064139/?tag=2022091-20
( Léon Walras (18341910) is one of the four or five most...)
Léon Walras (18341910) is one of the four or five most important economic theorists in the history of the science. The present book is a complete English translation of the second edition (1936) of his Études déconomie sociale (1896), in which he applies economic theory to real problems, presents the essence of his normative economic ideas, and reveals himself to have also been a great thinker on human nature, justice, mores, and the structure of scientific inquiry and knowledge. The book will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students in the area of the history of economics as well as those interested in Walrasian topics, such as social justice, taxation, intellectual property, and land ownership.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/113801320X/?tag=2022091-20
Léon Walras was born on 16 December 1834 in Évreux in Normandy. He was the son of the Auguste Walras, who was a school administrator and not a professional economist. Yet his economic thinking had a profound effect on his son.
To satisfy his parents, who were eager to see him assured of a recognized career, Later Léon Walras enrolled in the Paris School of Mines in 1854 after twice failing, for want of adequate mathematics, to gain admission into the prestigious Polytechnic School. Léon Walras was self-taught, having had no one but his father to guide his first steps, for there was no provision in the curriculum of French universities up to the 1870 to train professional economists.
Walras tried his hand first at journalism, then as an employee on the clerical staff of a railway company, then as manager of a bank for cooperatives, and finally as secretary in a private bank, until he was called in 1870 to occupy a newly founded chair in political economy at the Academy (later the University) of Lausanne in Switzerland.
His father vowed to realize his cherished ambition to renovate economics and place it on a firm scientific basis through his son.
This is precisely what Léon eventually did.
He owed this call to his early economic publications in book and journal form, and particularly to his participation in an International Congress on Taxation held in 1860 at Lausanne, where he had impressed Louis Ruchonnet, a young lawyer destined to become a leading Swiss statesman.
At Lausanne, however, where he could call upon the aid of his mathematical colleagues, he began systematically to lay theoretical foundations for his father's and his own pet policy proposals.
He also advocated a scheme for the long-run stabilization of the purchasing power of money by means of a regulatory silver token currency.
In the course of developing his pure theory, Walras utilized his independently, but belatedly, discovered theory of marginal utility to derive more rigorously than any of his precursors the relationship between the utility function and the demand function.
His theory of capital formation was formulated as a theory of the determination of prices of capital goods.
His theory of money represented a heroic attempt to integrate the monetary sector with the real sector of the economy instead of considering them as dichotomized entities.
The concept of "desired cash balances, " which he utilized in his definitive statement of monetary theory, largely anticipated the Keynesian liquidity-preference approach.
His most important works are El intents d'economic politique pure (1874- 1877) and Thiorie mathematique de la richesse sociale (1883).
Making use of the models and methods of earlier mathematical economists, especially A. N. Isnard and A. A. Cournot, he created a well-defined theory of a network of interrelated markets which had been only vaguely and intuitively perceived by his classical predecessors.
In 1892 Walras retired from teaching.
(In his fourth edition of Elements of Theoretical Economic...)
(Elements of Pure Economics was one of the most influentia...)
( Léon Walras (18341910) is one of the four or five most...)