For nearly ten years I have given, at London School of Economics, a course entitled ‘Marx, Walras and Keynes in the light of Contemporary Economic Analysis’. Its first two parts have already produced books on Marx and Walras, respectively, while the final part has yet remained to be written. During the time when I was writing these books, I became more and more convinced by a somewhat surprising new view that Marx and Walras might not have been diagonally opposed to each other. We can clearly observe in Marx's examinations of the so-called ‘transformation’ problems and his analysis of the reproduction schemes the discussion which is equivalent or, at least, corresponds with what Walras called the general equilibrium analysis. Moreover, more microscopically, we may say that these two scholars used a number of the same ‘parts’ in their respective systems analysis, especially the dual adjustment rules of prices and quantities.

These findings have directed my interest to Marx's and Walras' common guru, David Ricardo. As will become clear in this volume, at the time of Ricardo, Marx and Walras, the economic discipline had a core which might deserve the name of the old general equilibrium theory. This theory, being spanned by these three great names, is very much, if not entirely, different from the contemporary one represented by such economists as Hicks, Arrow, Debreu, Hahn, Malinvaud and others.