ABSTRACT
Léon Walras was a Frenchman who held a newly established professorship in political economy in the faculty of law at the University of Lausanne between 1870 and 1892. In his efforts to present the pure doctrine, Walras felt constrained to introduce certain simplification of the ideas held by earlier economists. Walras set to work to 'demonstrate' that which economists had already maintained; the market price implies that the quantity supplied is identical with that demanded. He emphasizes that shortage or insufficiency provides the absolute basis for the fact of relative exchange values. All individuals in the marketplace are assumed to know the shape of their subjective utility curves, which for every market price would provide a constellation of purchases that would maximize satisfaction. Walras felt, that it was necessary to replace the notion of the active individual as producer, seller, and saver in the market with 'the entrepreneurs whose goal was to realize profits through transforming production services into products'.
