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LÉON WALRAS’S THEORY OF PUBLIC INTEREST GOODS: TOWARD AN ORGANIC VIEW OF THE STATE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 September 2019

Alain Béraud  and
Guy Numa
Alain Béraud
Affiliation:
THEMA, University of Cergy-Pontoise, France
Guy Numa*
Affiliation:
Economics Department, Colorado State University, USA.
*
‡Address for correspondence: guy.numa@colostate.edu.
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Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to analyze Léon Walras’s theory of public interest goods. For him, “services and products of public interest are theoretically those that interest men as members of the community or of the State emanating from the authority to establish social conditions, that is, from the satisfaction of needs that are the same and equal to all” ([1875, 1897a] 1992, EEPA, p. 187). In Walras’s mind, this definition meant that public interest goods could not be factored into the utility function, in sharp contrast with the standard approach in public goods theory. Walras did not imply that public interest goods were not useful, but he maintained instead that their utility was felt only by the community as a whole and not by the individual. Walras developed an anti-individualistic view of the State in which the collective interest was not reducible to the sum of private interests.

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Articles
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , December 2019 , pp. 553 - 572
Copyright
Copyright © The History of Economics Society 2019 

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Footnotes

We are grateful to Amanar Akhabbar, Marianne Johnson, Manuela Mosca, Nathaniel Donahue, two anonymous referees, and the editors of JHET for their constructive comments.

References

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