Introduction

Jaffé's thesis

This chapter examines Walras's motives in constructing the models of his phase of maturity. It is a commonplace of writing on the history of economic thought that the work of one or another economist is alleged to have a normative bias in the sense that values and prejudices embedded in his ideational process and philosophical outlook have crept into his work without the writer being conscious of their influence. It is often maintained, for example, that value judgments operate in determining the selection of problems that a scientist finds interesting, or that a writer's treatment of his subject is affected by his being a member of a particular social class. The allegation made by William Jaffé about Walras's work was, however, of a different character, for he asserted that in developing the theory of general equilibrium in the Eléments, Walras consciously had the objective of constructing a normative system. Jaffé made that allegation about the constructions of Walras's creative phase and therefore about the models that Walras presented during his mature phase. Jaffé maintained that Walras's “latent purpose” was not “to describe or analyze the working of the economic system as it existed, nor primarily to portray the purely economic relations within a network of markets under the assumption of a theoretically perfect regime of free competition” (Jaffé 1977d, p. 386 [340]).