François Perroux, 1903-1987

François Perroux belongs to that small, strange group of unique Frenchmen who, in spite of the Anglophone dominance of economics, still manage to occasionally infect the imagination of the economics world with their novel ideas.

At Lyons, Perroux studied under Etienne Antonelli, the last lingering shadow of the Lausanne School.  Perroux himself taught at the faculty of law in Lyons from 1928 and subsequently Paris, from 1937 to 1976.  He also held a chair at the Collège de France for nearly fifty years.

In many ways, Perroux inherited the mantle of Leon Walras and carried it to perhaps where the failed engineering student would have liked to have taken it. Like Walras, he was a Cartesian in method, a socialist in sentiment and an evolutionist in vision. His early acquaintance and interaction with other independent thinkers, such as Pantaleoni, Aftalion, Schumpeter, Morgenstern and Allais, added even more streams of flavor into his unique blend of thinking. After setting up the Institut de Sciences Economiques Appliqueées (ISEA) in 1944, Perroux had a chance to encounter and absorb the ideas of the younger economists which converged upon it.

Perroux's first important book - La Valeur (1943) - was a rather standard exercise in understanding Walrasian thinking. But the germ was already there: "general equilibrium" as the interaction of multiple forces. These forces, Perroux contends, are active, constantly exerting change and capable of modifying not only economic parameters, but entire productive organization and social relationships. 

Perroux is best known in the rest of the economics profession for his contributions to spatial economics and economic development.

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