Léon Walras Was Hired as a Professor of Economics in Lausanne Because, and Not in spite of, His Socialism

Walras, born in 1834, was the son of Auguste Walras (1801-1866), an amateur economist who favored a utility and scarcity value theory and agreed with James Mill about the desirability of the nationalization of land. Léon Walras borrowed the important elements of pure and social economics from his father but his analytical method belongs only to him. Nevertheless, the beginnings of Walras’s career were not easy. As a supernumerary pupil at the Paris Ecoles des Mines, he never got a degree and became, for his first job, a kind of secretary in a railway company. From 1864 to 1870 he devoted himself to the cooperative sector and wrote some of his most important pieces in social economy. He did not begin to lay the foundations of his mathematical economics until 1871, when he took the new chair of political economy just created in the same Vaud Canton which had honored Proudhon. Walras’s pure and social economies are not, however, unrelated. Besides, Walras was hired as a professor of economics in Lausanne because, and not in spite of, his socialism. Walras spent the rest of his life in Switzerland. Although he never managed to get a chair of economics in France, which he craved for many years, he lived long enough (until 1910) to contemplate the triumph of neoclassical economics and to enjoy the prestige of his own pure theory among a growing number of young disciples.

—Michel Herland, “Three French Socialist Economists: Leroux, Proudhon, Walras,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 18, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 134-135.