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On Allais, one of the real issues is the excessive set of claims made  
both by Allais, and his pupils/supporters, on his behalf over many  
years. 
 
For instance, it has been argued in print in a number of places that  
Allais "discovered/proved" the first real stability theorems for a  
competitive equilbrium in his (untranslated) 1943 A la recherche  
d'une discipline economique: Premiere partie: l'economie pure  
(accents omitted, sorry). This claim is, frankly, rubbish.For  
documentation, see pp. 76-86 in my Stabilizing Dynamics (1991). 
 
This kind of claim is not unique. For a particularly astonishing self- 
presentation of "How I got it right and everyone else did not" see  
Allais's "Theories of General Economic Equilibrium and Maximum  
Efficiency" in G. Schwodiauer's (1978) Euilibrium and Disequilibrium  
in Economic Theory. In the footnotes to this paper we have a  
masterful and zany reconstruction of  the history of GE Theory from  
the French perspective. 
 
Allais's self-presentation is quite similar to the kind of nonsense  
uncovered by Leonard in his EJ paper "Reading Nash, Reading Cournot"  
in which a French game theory history is constructed (by French  
authors) forwards and backwards in time to eliminate Nash's  
contribution from serious consideration.  
 
It all reminds me of the old Soviet claims that everything good in  
the world, from airplanes to gelato, from penicillin to baseball, was  
created by a Soviet citizen.  
 
Perhaps this self-aggrandizement has its roots in the lack of  
criticism faced in the academic system by senior professors in France  
in past decades? (Pierre Bourdieu's Homo Academicus (1988) is useful  
on this topic.) 
 
E. Roy Weintraub 
 
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