Renormalization and effective lagrangians

There is a strong intuitive understanding of renormalization, due to Wilson, in terms of the scaling of effective lagrangians. We show that this can be made the basis for a proof of perturbative renormalization. We first study renormalizability in the language of renormalization group flows for a toy renormalization group equation. We then derive an exact renormalization group equation for a four-dimensional λø ⁴ theory with a momentum cutoff. We organize the cutoff dependence of the effective lagrangian into relevant and irrelevant parts, and derive a linear equation for the irrelevant part. A lengthy but straightforward argument establishes that the piece identified as irrelevant actually is so in perturbation theory. This implies renormalizability. The method extends immediately to any system in which a momentum-space cutoff can be used, but the principle is more general and should apply for any physical cutoff. Neither Weinberg's theorem nor arguments based on the topology of graphs are needed.