Walras and Ricardo

Introduction Most of Part VII of Léon Walras’s Elements of Pure Economics ( [1871] 1954) is devoted to a critical discussion of some of the views advocated by earlier schools of economic thought. In this paper we shall scrutinize Walras’s « exposition and refutation » of the classical authors. He accuses Smith, Ricardo and John Stuart Mill of having committed « fundamental errors ». In addition, Ricardo and his followers are criticized for having failed to develop « a unified general theory t...