Léon Walras, 1834–1910: the Notion of General Equilibrium

Léon Walras, the founder of the modern theory of general equilibrium, was born in Evreux, a French market town. His father was a secondary school administrator with a penchant for economic studies; his mother the daughter of a notary. After completing his preliminary education at Caen and Douai, Walras entered the School of Mines at Paris in 1854 but abandoned its studies some years later for literature, art and philosophy. He published a novel in 1858, the year he also promised his father to continue his work in economics Miscellaneous employment followed while he searched for a university appointment in France. He worked as journalist, for a railway company, for a cooperative bank which failed and a private bank, and as a public lecturer for the cooperative movement. Participation in 1860 at an international congress on taxation at Lausanne (through the favourable impression he had made there on a local politician) secured his appointment in 1870 as Professor of Economics at its university. He retired in 1892 in order to complete his writing programme. In 1874 and 1877 he had published what became his best known work, Elements d’économie politique pure. Early retirement enabled publication of Etudes d’économie sociale (1896) and Etudes d’économie politique appliquée (1898) as collections of earlier work covering social justice, property, distributional issues, and monetary questions. The financial implications of the long illness of his first wife over the 1870s forced interruptions to his research through casual journalism and consultancies with an insurance company to make ends meet. Financial security only came with his second marriage in the 1880s and a legacy in the 1890s. He died in 1910.