Two considerations have prompted me to have another look at Léon Walras's (L. W.'s) theory of tâtonnement. One is my growing dissatisfaction with my own prior look that goes back to 1967 when my article, “Walras's Theory of Tâtonnement: A Critique of Recent Interpretations,” was published; the other is my present disagreement with Professor Michio Morishima's recent interpretation of the same theory in Chapter 2, “The Tâtonnement,” of his Walras' Economics: A Pure Theory of Capital and Money, published in 1977.

My purpose is not to pick a quarrel with Morishima's or anyone else's Walras-like theories of tâtonnement, which, indeed, are often better than the original, especially from the standpoint of econometrically motivated analysis. My sole aim is to show that the ‘present-mindedness’ of our contemporaries tends to blind them to the original purport of past texts. The principle of historical integrity is too dear to the heart of a practiced historian to allow textual misinterpretations (his own included) to pass unnoticed.

L. W. could not have found a better label than tâtonnement to attach to his theory of the emergence of multi-market equilibrium. It describes perfectly how he reached for the theory, though it is a misnomer for the theory itself, especially in its definitive version. From edition to edition of the Eléments, beginning with the first part of the first edition of 1874–1877, he groped and groped for an answer to his problem, and, in the end, he shifted his ground and actually, perhaps without quite realizing it, gave up the quest.