Walras suggested that equilibrium would always be achieved through a process of tâtonnement (French for "trial and error"), a form of hill climbing.
[1] In the 1970s, however, the Sonnenschein–Mantel–Debreu theorem proved that such a process would not necessarily reach a unique and stable equilibrium, even if the market is populated with perfectly rational agents.
The process is called tâtonnement, or groping, relating to finding the market clearing price for all commodities and giving rise to general equilibrium.
The device is an attempt to avoid one of deepest conceptual problems of perfect competition, which may, essentially, be defined by the stipulation that no agent can affect prices.
Until Walker and van Daal's 2014 translation (retitled Elements of Theoretical Economics), William Jaffé's Elements of Pure Economics (1954) was for many years the only English translation of Walras's Éléments d’économie politique pure.