Leon Walras Essay

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Léon Walras (16 December 1834 - 5 January 1910) Biography Marie-Ésprit Léon Walras was born in Évreux, France (near Montreux, Switzerland) on December 16th, 1834. Walras was the son of the French proto-marginalist, economist and schoolteacher, Antonie-Auguste Walras, who encouraged his son to pursue economics with a particular emphasis on mathematics. Walras enrolled in the Paris School of Mine but grew tired of engineering. He spent most of his early life in Paris as a novelist and art critic (had quite a Bohemian youth). He also tried careers as a bank manager, journalist, romantic novelist and a clerk at a railway company, administrator of cooperative bank before turning to economics .In that scientific discipline Walras claimed to have found “pleasures and joys like those that religion provides to the faithful.” In 1858, one evening while the two were out walking, his father situated the postulate in Léon that to create a scientific theory of economics one would need to use differential calculus to derive a ‘science of economic forces, analogous to the science of astronomical forces’. Léon soon became convinced that if the equations of differential calculus could capture the motion of the planets and atoms in the universe, then they should also be able to capture the motion of human minds in the economy. He followed his father's footsteps by adopting his "socialist policy positions" on taxation and land reforms as well as inheriting his father's interest in social reform and main economic ideas such as subjective value theory and mathematization of economics. Another of Walras’ influences was Augustin Cournot, a former schoolmate of his father (from whom the “Cournot Equilibrium” is derived). Through Cournot, Walras came under the influence of French Rationalism and was introduced to the use of mathematics in economics. In the years to follow, Léon Walras

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