ABSTRACT
William Jaffé, the leading authority on the history of general-equilibrium theory, died in Toronto on 17 August 1980 aged eighty-two years. His constant fear that his researches (begun over half a century ago) would remain unfinished has come to pass. He died in harness, engaged on the ‘Life and Writings of Léon Walras, 1834-1910’. We must be thankful that his papers are in the expert hands of Professor D.A.Walker of the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, as he wished, so that the finished portions of the ‘Life’ will not be lost to us. We have also the series of seminal articles, many of them written in very recent years-the latest item from his pen appeared in the June 1980 issue of the Journal of Economic Literature and yet another is in pressdealing with the origins of Walras’s system; the relation of Walras’s theoretical contributions to those of his predecessors and contemporaries; and the critical evaluations and emendations of Walras’s theories of general equilibrium, capital, and money in the twentieth-century literature (including the recent interpretation by Michio Morishima). It is hoped that these articles will appear, under Donald Walker’s direction, as Jaffé planned, in a volume of collected essays [1983].
