Recent publications have once more drawn the attention of the scientific world to the School of Lausanne. While economists emphasize chiefly the originality of the conception of economic equilibrium in Walras, sociologists and mathematicians pay homage to Pareto's versatile genius. Contemporary authors are mainly interested in the mathematical method and the conception of pure economics advanced by these two men. But the same authors forget too easily that Walras and Pareto dealt with numerous political and social questions, and that their opinions in these matters are important from the point of view of both applied economics and methodology. The object of this paper is to discuss these opinions. We shall first state the great philosophical antithesis which marks the division between the ideas expressed by Walras and Pareto, and secondly, consider the ideas themselves.
Although the works of Walras and Pareto on the subject of pure economics are complementary, their methods in dealing with practical economics are completely different. According to Walras, the duty of a politician is to apply the principles and data deduced by the pure economist. The pure economist must scientifically deduce laws from the “good old Natural Law.” Walras believes in scientific ideals and in the permanence of political laws; in philosophy, he is a Realist, in the sense given to this word by the quarrel of the Universals. In contrast with this, the conception of Pareto is much more flexible, much more pragmatic. His doctrine is that certain principles, rationally erroneous, can in practical reality be excellent, because people are usually governed by their feelings and not by their intelligence. To the great Italian, scientific laws were only “experimental uniformities.” This is the conception of the nominalist philosophy, which Pareto stresses when he writes: “Io sono il piu nominalista dei nominalisti.”