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I am largely in agreement with Michael P. Lynch's assesment of 
Allais, but, by the same token, I don't disagree with E. Roy 
Weintraub either. 
 
I am willing to accept that Allais might seem to suffer a 
disprortionate persecution complex and his self-aggrandizement 
and scathing commentaries on "Anglo-Saxon" contemporaries is 
inadmissably catty, bordering on the offensive.  I take that to 
be an idiosyncratic quirk in the man.  We see evidence of this 
quirkiness already in his youthful work, ARDE (1944) (for which 
he was given a tongue-lashing by, I think, Oskar Morgenstern), 
so I suspect it has been in Allais's personality all along, and 
is not an "outcome" of the French professorial system. 
 
Be that as it may, it is not enough reason to denigrate his  
contributions or pooh-pooh his complaints as delirium.   I believe 
it is perfectly legitimate for Allais to stake a claim for correct 
attribution -- if it is due.  For instance, his claim that 
Samuelson "robbed" him of the utility possibilities frontier is 
exaggerated, but he did develop it before Samuelson and the 
profession has not been in a hurry to correct that.  This happened 
with OLG as well, although that has, by and large, been recently 
rectified.  By way of comparison, not all Soviet claims to 
originality are illegitimate either (e.g. I understand there 
is sufficient evidence to confirm that Alexander Popov invented 
the wireless telegraph before Marconi.) 
 
Allais's contribution to the Schwodiauer volume is effectively 
a methodological "announcement" of his Theorie General de Surplus 
(1981 in Economie et Societes, published as a book in 1989).  I 
consider that piece of work (the book, not the article) 
remarkable, but I must admit that I "feel" like I understand 
more than perhaps I really do.  But, acknowledging that, I find 
it insightful and original and certainly deserves more attention. 
Allais's tale is more a "visionary" sketch of a story than a hard-boiled "theory". The
ideas Allais develops in that book fits almost
hand-in-glove to that being developed (with no less grandiose 
majesty) by Ostroy and Makowski (e.g. 1998, JET).  In fact, it 
actually holds a family resemblance to Weintraub and Graham (1975)! 
However,  I think Allais (& Makowski & Ostroy) fall short in 
detailing the proper nitty-gritty dynamics of their surplus-elimination "arbitrage"
process.  The two most underdeveloped
points are information structures and the details of what (in my 
reading) ought to be a random trade process.  On another note, for 
Allais's new welfare measure, I'd recommend David Luenberger's work 
on the "benefit function" (J Math Econ, c. 1992 I think), which 
shares many of its features. 
 
As far as Allais's "French" reading of the history of general 
equilibrium, it is a reading which I do not find wholly illegitimate. 
It strays from the canonical Cambridge-centered tale, but remains 
interesting nonetheless and quite refreshing. 
 
But Allais is not an intellectual historian  (although he has tried 
his hand at other fields of history) and I would presume that his 
attempt to place his own theories in a historical thoroughfare, while 
a bit self-serving, could be forgiven.  As far as his claim to have 
done the "dynamics" of general equilibrium, I agree wholeheartedly 
with Roy Weintraub's assessment in his "Stabilizing Dynamics". 
But let it remain that although I think Allais should occasionally 
wash his mouth out with soap, I think his contributions were real 
and insightful.  His Nobel prize was well-deserved and I think 
the English-speaking community would benefit from a translation of 
the Theorie Generale de Surplus (if anyone is up to the task!) 
 
Incidentally, does anybody have links about the previously-mentioned 
movement of French economics students and their positions other than 
that e-mail?  The only thing I could find online regarding Allais's 
position on things of this sort was a 1999 article in Le Figaro at: 
 
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/claude.rochet/EU/art/allais.html 
 
 
Goncalo Fonseca 
 
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