Though Walras's Eléments d'économie politique pure is couched in the language of pure theory and appears, on the surface, as a completely wert-frei synoptic view of the interdependent operations of an economic system under a hypothetical regime of perfectly free competition, nevertheless the implicit moral convictions that inform the model occasionally show through—nowhere better than in Walras's theorem of maximum social satisfaction. I propose, therefore, to concentrate my attention on that theorem: showing in the first part how, for want of proper attention to Walras's moral bias, the theorem came to be misunderstood by Walras's most eminent critics, and, in the second part, how this bias was brought out into the open in Walras's analysis of Gossen's theory of maximum subjective gain from trade.

A common complaint against Léon Walras is that he misconceived the maximization of social satisfaction. A good example of this complaint appears in William Baumol's Welfare Economics and the Theory of the State, where we are told: