The publication dates 1874–77 of the first edition of Léon Walras's Eléments d'économie politique pure make this, its centenary, a fitting season of commemorating its birth. Whether one is inclined to applaud or to berate the memorialized book, its author must be credited with having earned the title of a “classical author,” at least in the sense that Alfred Marshall defined the term:

If the advent of Walras's Eléments can lay claim to more than anecdotal interest, it is because it represented from its first appearance a theoretical innovation which, as time went on, imparted a new direction to economic thinking. It taught economists to discern in the hubbub of countless markets the semblance of a coherent pattern of interdependencies amenable to rational comprehension and rigorous analysis. To be sure, adumbrations of the same pattern had already appeared in earlier literature and were known to Walras.