1 This volume, together with my previous works, Marx's Economics and Walras's Economics, forms a trilogy on the first-generation of scientific economists – Ricardo, Marx and Walras. Whilst many of us have little objection to regarding Marx as a Ricardian, some, perhaps many, would reject the view that Walras tried and provided, in his Elements of Pure Economics, a microeconomic foundation to Ricardo's economics. In fact, William Jaffé, the translator of Walras' Éléments, insists that there was ‘no room for growth’ in Walras' economics, whereas growth was Ricardo's central subject. However, Jaffé's conclusion completely contradicts the facts. In Part VII (of the Elements) entitled ‘Conditions and Consequences of Economic Progress: Critique of Systems of Pure Economies’, Walras used the general equilibrium models developed in Parts II–VI to derive ‘the laws of the variation of prices in a progressive economy’. This means that his general equilibrium theory is nothing else but the groundwork for those laws which are summarized as:

1. ‘In a progressive economy, the price of labour (wages) remaining substantially unchanged, the price of land-services (rent) will rise appreciably and the price of capital-services (the interest charge) will fall appreciably.’

2. ‘In a progressive economy, the rate of net income will fall appreciably.’

3. ‘In a progressive economy, the price of capital goods proper remaining constant, the price of personal faculties will rise in proportion to the fall in the rate of net income, and the price of land will rise both by reasons of the fall in the rate of income and by reason of the rise in rent.’