Our examination of the work of Léon Walras’ Elements of Pure Economics is a return to the architectonic form in the wake of David Ricardo. Walras provides us with perhaps the most well-delineated and internally coherent architectonic in modern economics. While there is no question that he rejects the Ricardian tradition almost outright, and with it his labour theory of value, his laws of distribution and his use of ‘quasi-mathematical’ language, he did admire the role that Ricardo played within the history of ‘pure theory’ and the construction of a new and formal economic science. In the Elements Walras renovates economic theory by combining three essential elements: (1) the subjectivist understanding of value (as posited through the grounding force of marginal utility theory); (2) the mathematization of economic thought within an almost completely enclosed system of reasoning; and (3) the reliance upon the mythic force of general equilibrium. In this particularly contained architectonic I will focus on the construction of subjectivity insofar as it operates in and through temporality. The question of time is essential if we want to understand the epistemological nature of subjects that marginal utility describes, subjects that correspond (through fictional economic agents such as the entrepreneur and the auctioneer) mathematically to the market and to the self-regulating universe of equilibrium. In order to mathematically create the world of economic activity itself, time is manipulated, and even occasionally sacrificed, from the lives of those who inhabit it. Within this system built by means of the temporal containment of economic subjectivity, I will focus upon three distinct yet interconnected temporalities. These temporalities lay the foundation for his entire system of thought, and, within this thought, his entire conception of economic subjectivity. The temporality of marginal utility, as it involves the desire structure of solipsistic individuals in direct confrontational contact, will be my first concern. Second, I will address general equilibrium and its claims to universality through the spatial metaphors of the physical sciences. Finally, after a brief detour in which I will examine the ‘real’ subjects (i.e. differentiated and non-abstract) of Walras’ architectonic, I turn to the temporal mechanism of tâtonnement. This most influential conceptualization of the economic process will show us the way in which Walras connects the subjects whose knowledge resides in the timeless exchange relations of marginal utility theory, to the vast economic universe governed by the laws of general

equilibrium. The marginalist revolution is informed, in Walras’ edifice of thought, in his architectonic, by a renovation in time, by a shift from the rationalization of the natural in its Ricardian instantiation, to a subjectively driven and present-oriented state of mathematical analysis and purportedly universal truth. The tension between the devices he employs to bring about such a universalism, the tension between marginal utility, tâtonnement and general equilibrium, will bring the Ricardian question of the capitalist subject into a radically altered realm, into the theoretical realm of the subjectivity of immediate desire and direct exchange.