Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART I WALRAS'S BIOGRAPHY
- PART II THE GENESIS AND DEVELOPMENT OF WALRAS'S IDEAS
- 3 A. N. Isnard, progenitor of the Walrasian general equilibrium model (1969)
- 4 The birth of Léon Walras's Eléments (1977)
- 5 A centenarian on a bicentenarian: Léon Walras's Eléments on Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1977)
- 6 Léon Walras and his relations with American economists (1960)
- PART III THE SCOPE OF WALRAS'S WORK
- PART IV SPECIAL TOPICS IN WALRAS'S ECONOMICS
- PART V WALRAS'S PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT
- Index
6 - Léon Walras and his relations with American economists (1960)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART I WALRAS'S BIOGRAPHY
- PART II THE GENESIS AND DEVELOPMENT OF WALRAS'S IDEAS
- 3 A. N. Isnard, progenitor of the Walrasian general equilibrium model (1969)
- 4 The birth of Léon Walras's Eléments (1977)
- 5 A centenarian on a bicentenarian: Léon Walras's Eléments on Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1977)
- 6 Léon Walras and his relations with American economists (1960)
- PART III THE SCOPE OF WALRAS'S WORK
- PART IV SPECIAL TOPICS IN WALRAS'S ECONOMICS
- PART V WALRAS'S PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT
- Index
Summary
What can be said that is new about the School of Lausanne to professors and students of the University of Lausanne? You must have heard before almost anything I can present. Nevertheless, I dare hope that my research will at least enable me to throw a special light upon certain familiar matters.
There are some facts about Walras's life that are not recorded in the archives of Lausanne, archives that in other respects are so rich. For example, I could mention his private life, which was so carefully hidden by him and his daughter, Aline, from their Swiss contemporaries. Fearing that their friends in the canton of Vaud, who were models of decorum and propriety, would mistakenly think ill about her father, Aline Walras sent most of his private correspondence to Lyons, where I found it preserved in the law school. That correspondence put me on the track of other materials, which I uncovered in the archives of Montpellier, in the records of the cemetery in Paris, and in the register general's archives devoted to the Walras family. I hasten to add that if the facts uncovered by this search would have caused some frowns in certain quarters in the time of Walras, they were not scandalous facts, although they ran counter to social conventions.
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- William Jaffe's Essays on Walras , pp. 108 - 118Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1983