From Social Satisfaction Maximization to Welfare: Walras’s Specific Conception of Society

Walras considered that his contribution to the social satisfaction max­imum only concerned private and not public goods: according to him, the “principle of free trade” could not be applied to goods related to public and not to private interest.

They are related to Walras’s specific conception of the society. According to this conception, individual members of a given society are not only rational agents, namely agents behaving according to the sole rules or rational choice theory. Let us start from the Cours d'Economie Sociale. In these lectures Walras defended the idea that social states are also and before all natural states. Why? Because, for Leon Walras, “man is characterized by his ability for the division of labour and by his moral personality” (“l’homme se caracterise par l’aptitude a la division du travail et par la personnalite morale”) (Walras, 1886/1996: 94). Now both these human features allow human beings to be different from and superior to animals.

Thus, division of labor is not the result of a learning process as it is for instance in Alfred Marshall’s Principles (Arena, 2002). It is a basic human feature. Referring to it, Walras wrote:

It is certainly a natural fact insofar as it does not depend on us to divide or not to divide labour, as it does not depend on us to be bipedal or four-legged, two-handed or four­handed (C’est assurement un fait naturel en ce sens qu’il ne depend pas plus de nous [italics added] de diviser le travail que de ne le point diviser qu’il ne depend de nous d’etre bipedes ou quadrupedes, bimanes ou quadrumanes). (Walras, 1886/1996: 119)

Division of labor does not therefore result from individual rational choices or from agent optimizing processes; it is a characteristic and “natural” feature of human beings: “Division of labour is a natural and not a free fact” (La division du travail est un fait naturel et non point libre) (Walras, 1886/ 1996: 120).

The specialization of employments is not for man a conventional process and an optional resource but it is also for him the first and unavoidable condition of his existence and subsistance (Non seulement la specialite des occupations n'est point pour l'homme un procede conventionnel et une ressource facultative mais encore c’est pour lui la condition premiere et ineluctable de son existence et de sa subsistance). (Walras, 1886/1996: 120)

The concept of “personnalite morale” also contributes to distinguish human beings from animals. Far from being defined as the bearers of some form of free will, individual agents or rather “moral persons” are the result of psychology and sociology:

Moral personality is therefore a plant the development of which requires two necessary elements: a germ which is the psychological man, namely the human soul including all his faculties and a ground that is society including its institutions and traditions (La personne morale est donc une plante au developpement de laquelle deux elements sont necessaires: un germe qui est l'homme psychologique, c'est-a-dire fame humaine avec ses facultes, et un terrain qui est la societe avec ses institutions et ses traditions). (Walras, 1886/1996: 143)

Now, one of the reasons that explains why moral personality as well as division of labor provide the foundations of the distinction between ani­mals and men derives from the fact that men's will is “conscious and free,” while animals' one is “instinctive and fatal” (Walras, 1896/1990: 101). In other words, nature and not free will or free choices explain division of labor and moral personalities. Only a second stage can allow to set apart “humanitarian” from natural facts: division of labor is independent from human will but the existence of their moral personality paves the way to free and reasonable will, even if it is not sufficient to explain it fully:

It is often said that man is a reasonable and a free being, namely a moral person distinct from all the other beings who not being either reasonable or free are only things (L'homme, dit-on est un etre raisonnable et libre, c'est-a- dire une personne morale par opposition a tous les autres etres qui n'etant ni raisonnables, ni libres, ne sont que des choses). (Walras, 1896/1990: 34)

Thus, division of labor and “personnalite morale” “are also two natural facts but simultaneously they also provide the double foundation of all the humanitarian facts” (sont encore deux faits naturels, mais ils sont en meme temps le double principe de tous les faits humanitaires) (Walras, 1896/ 1990: 91).

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