WALRAS, Léon.

£12,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Éléments d'économie politique pure ou théorie de la richesse sociale. First edition, first issue, in the original wrappers, of the first part of Walras's key work; remaining sheets were later issued with the second part, published in 1877 and continuously paginated.Three years after Jevons and Menger, but independently of them, Walras here enunciated the theory of marginal utility. In this work he continued and refined the work inherited from his father and was successful in developing the law of general equilibrium which made him famous. Éléments fell into two parts: part I, present here, deals with the theory of exchange (pp. 1-208), while part II focused on the theory of production. "The book regards exchange as the central economic phenomenon and treats all other branches of economic study in relation to this central fact" (Batson)."Walras operates with essentially the same concepts as Jevons, but he searches continuously for solutions of the most general character. Like Jevons and Menger, he bases exchange-value on utility and limitation of quantity. Following his father, he uses the term rareté, which he defines as the "dérivée de l'utilité effective par rapport à la quantité possédée". In other words, rareté is the same as marginal utility. The desire to equalize marginal utilities (according to Gossen's second law) will lead to exchange. And this desire, together with the stocks of goods possessed by each individual, will give a determinate demand or supply for each i

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