Walras and Tugan-Baranovsky on socialism: Reconciling economic science and social ideal

Abstract

Nowadays, Leon Walras (1839—1910) is well-known first and foremost for his “Elements of pure political economy, or the theory of public wealth” (1874, 1877) and Mikhail Ivanovich Tugan-Baranovsky (1865—1919) gained a wide recognition due to his book “Industrial crises in contemporary England: Their causes and influences on the life of the people” (1894), which had a significant impact on the development of economics. At the same time, both economists were deeply concerned not only with theoretical problems, but also with those that are now considered beyond the scope of theory, the problem of social ideal and that of a more just social system being among them. Walras and Tugan-Baranovsky associated the embodiment of the social ideal with socialism and strived for an economic system that corresponded to that ideal, albeit their conceptions of socialism being different. The principal opportunity to achieve reconciliation between science and ideal was associated with a synthetic approach reconciling the scientific method and ideal, economics being considered “a bridge” between them, or a «testing ground», where the reconciliation was to take place. Although history has shown that Walras’s and Tugan-Baranovsky’s ideas of socialism were utopian, the very fact that two eminent economists were deeply concerned with the problem of social ideal and socialism at a time when the foundations of modern economics were being laid, shows that the striving of economists to create objective and rigorous science was, to a measure, driven by their aspiration to solve the social problem and to set up a social and economic system which is rational and more just than the existing one