“Rise and Fall” of the Walrasian Program in Economics: A Social and Intellectual Dynamics of the General Equilibrium Theory

This paper aims at understanding social practices and institutions which ensured the transnational diffusion, recognition and renewal of the research program in General Equilibrium Theory, in spite of multiple critics and apparent theoretical dead ends. First, we are tracing the main conceptual developments of the Walrasian GET program since the 1950s and thus elaborate on its intellectual identity. Then, based on a systematic study of the educational and professional trajectories typical for several generations of GET scholars, we analyze a social form taken by this transnational and multidisciplinary “scientific community”: an institutional dynamics of the Walrasian GET program, most common career patterns, and the forms of international and intergenerational transmission. Finally, we apply to this dataset a technique of geometric analysis, a Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), in order to investigate the relational patterns between attribution of scientific credit (symbolic capital) and biographical properties in a transnational space of the GET scholars.