François Perroux belongs to that small, strange group of unique Frenchmen who, in spite of the Anglophone dominance of economics, still manage to ocassionally infect the imagination of the economics world with their novel ideas.
At Collège de France, Perroux studied under Etienne Antonelli, the last lingering shadow of the Lausanne School. 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, he had a chance to encounter and absorb the ideas of the younger economists which converged upon it.
His 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.
Major Works of François Perroux
Resources on Francois Perroux