António de Sousa Horta Sarmento Osório, 1882-1960.

António Horta Osório was a Portuguese disciple (at a distance) of the Lausanne School. Born in Lousa, the son of a noble family, Osorio took his degree in law at the University of Coimbra in 1908.  A curious man with vast interests, Osorio was a notable lawyer (he would assist the Bank of Portugal during the great Alves do Reis fraud case of 1925), an early automobile fanatic and Olympic fencer. 

In 1911, the new republican government authorized the formation of the University of Lisbon, gathering within it various older schools, including the Escola Politécnica de Lisboa (what would later be renamed the Faculty of Sciences).  Hoping to secure an appointment to the chair in political economy, Osorio presented a candidacy thesis on the mathematical theory of exchange (1911).  Osorio's candidacy failed before the conservative appointment committee, who preferred a more-established juristic-literary empiricist, Afonso Costa.  Curiously, Costa himself lobbied hard for the opening of another chair, which he hoped to induce Osorio to take, but Osorio declined to apply, claiming that if they didn't find him useful the first time, they wouldn't find him useful the second.

Osorio's 1911 thesis was presented as the first of two volumes (the second would never be written, probably out of disillusionment with the results of his candidacy).  It was translated and published in French in 1913 with a laudatory preface by Vilfredo Pareto.

There is little that is original in Osorio's work - he follows closely the presentation of Walras, and, more pointedly, Pareto, who's own Manuale had only been published shortly before.  Osorio's first chapter traces the history of mathematical economics, before moving on to a discussion of the "scope" of pure analytical theory in economics.  He defends the mathematical method as a vehicle of discovery itself, declaring that "if mathematics provides us merely with a new language, then it is not worth employing it" (1911: p.9). Osorio takes severe issue with Walras's "instrumental" vision for it, and lauds instead Pareto's methodological stance (Pareto, in his preface, takes the opportunity to reinforce that and mock some of Walras's schemes).  Nonetheless, he faithfully reproduces the scheme from Walras's Elements (including tatonnement and counting equations and unknowns), before moving onto the presentations of Pareto's Cours (1896) and Manuel (1909). It ends rather abruptly, giving us no idea what Osorio might have had planned for the second volume.

Osorio's work was not particularly successful. Edgeworth, Schumpeter and a handful of others gave it a tip of that hat, particularly to his ruminations on utility as an index, rather than a measure.  Lacking originality, it's principal merit was its attempt to popularize the work of the Lausanne School.

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