ABSTRACT
Léon Walras claimed that Free Market economics presents as working well a system which works badly, and that Marxism presents a system which will not work at all. He examined the simultaneous determination of all prices and all quantities of goods in the economic system. Classical economists had been concerned with the causes of the wealth of nations and with its distribution among the factors of production within the framework of population growth, finite resources and free competition in a private enterprise system. Economic growth is made exogenous and relegated to the sphere of technology, and new attitudes to the sphere of sociology and psychology. Vilfredo Pareto and his disciples' notion of an equilibrium-seeking system reflected, and continues to reflect in its modern guises, the urge of the ruling oligarchy to protect its position by freezing the existing social and economic structure of society.
