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ON WALRAS'S THEORY OF CAPITAL (PROVISIONAL DRAFT 1962)

Despite the recent increase of interest in the notion of capital as a set of distinct factors or agents of production, little attention seems to have been devoted to the original formulation of that theory in Part V of Léon Walras’s Elements. An effect of the comparative neglect of that part of Walras’s work is that while mathematical inquiries have been conducted to ascertain the existence of economical meaningful solution for the equations of exchange and production, the analysis has not been extended, to the writer’s knowledge, to the complete system, including the equations of ‘‘capitalization.’’ It is however submitted in this paper that economic reasoning is sufficient to show the inconsistency between Walras’s conception of capital as a set of heterogeneous factors of production, and the equilibrium conditions regarding the rates of return on the different kinds of capital goods. It will also be argued that if—to preserve Walras’s notion of capital and avoid conceiving capital as a homogeneous factor—the inconsistency is removed by abandoning Walras’s equilibrium conditions for the rates of return, or equivalent ones, the notion of equilibrium thereby postulated would be such as to leave little if any significance to the system.