[4] Walras is best known for his book Éléments d'économie politique pure, a work that has contributed greatly to the mathematization of economics through the concept of general equilibrium.

For Walras, exchanges only take place after a Walrasian tâtonnement (French for "trial and error"), guided by the auctioneer, has made it possible to reach market equilibrium.

It was the general equilibrium obtained from a single hypothesis, rarity, that led Joseph Schumpeter to consider him "the greatest of all economists".

The notion of general equilibrium was very quickly adopted by major economists such as Vilfredo Pareto, Knut Wicksell and Gustav Cassel.

Although Walras came to be regarded as one of the three leaders of the marginalist revolution,[14] he was not familiar with the two other leading figures of marginalism, William Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger, and developed his theories independently.

Elements has Walras disagreeing with Jevons on the applicability, while the findings adopted by Carl Menger, he says, are completely in alignment with the ideas present in the book (even though expressed non-mathematically).

[15] Walras's law implies that the sum of the values of excess demands across all markets must equal zero, whether or not the economy is in a general equilibrium.

In 1874 and 1877 Walras published the work that led him to be considered the father of the general equilibrium theory, Éléments d'économie politique pure [see next section for bibliographical details].

A more rigorous version of the argument was developed independently by Lionel McKenzie and the pair Kenneth Arrow and Gérard Debreu in the 1950s.

Walras suggests that equilibrium will be achieved through a process of tâtonnement (French for "trial and error"), a form of incremental hill climbing.

Whether a substance is searched for by a doctor to heal an ill person, or by an assassin to poison his family, this is an important question from other points of view, albeit totally indifferent from ours.

In 1941 George Stigler[17] wrote about Walras: There is no general history of economic thought in English which devotes more than passing reference to his work.

This sort of empty fame in English-speaking countries is of course attributable in large part to Walras's use of his mother tongue, French, and his depressing array of mathematical formulas.

What caused the re-appraisal of Walras's consideration in the US, was the influx of German-speaking scientists – the German version of his Théorie Mathématique de la Richesse Sociale was published in 1881.

The 'Théorie Mathématique de la Richesse Sociale' included in the list of other works (below) is described by the National Library of Australia as 'a series of lectures and articles that together summarize the mathematical elements of the author's Élements '.

[23] Walker and van Daal describe Jaffé's translation of the word crieur as 'a momentous error that has misled generations of readers'.