On Piero Sraffa’s Contributions to Economics

Abstract

Piero Sraffa has always found writing difficult — indeed, the introductions to the great edition of Ricardo’s works and correspondence were finally written only because Maurice Dobb collaborated with Sraffa. They discussed each paragraph, Dobb wrote it, Sraffa corrected the draft until it was to his liking, and then they went on to talk about the next paragraph (see Eatwell, 1979, pp. 143–4). The core of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960) was written in the late 1920s, ‘particular points … were worked out in the thirties and forties’, and it was only when Sraffa put the ‘old notes’ together in the second half of the 1950s that he filled in the ‘gaps which had become apparent in the process’ (Sraffa, 1960, p. vi). I recently asked him whether the conjecture of Peter Sallans (see Harcourt, 1982, pp. 271–2, n. 7) was correct, to wit, that it was Hume’s Abstract, which Keynes and Sraffa edited together in the 1930s (see Hume, 1938) that led him to write Production of Commodities in such a sparse, stark manner. He answered that it was because he disliked writing so much that he wrote Production of Commodities in as few words as possible. Of course, his reply was partly a joke, a tease. As Krishna Bharadwaj reminds me (letter of 1 January 1982), Sraffa ‘could compose prose quite easily [and] could draft letters in no time’. It was with the final product, which had to meet the extraordinarily high standards which he set himself, his ‘insistence on perfection’, that the ‘difficulty’ partly lay.

Reprinted from P. D. Groenewegen and J. Halevi (eds), Altro Polo: Italian Economics Past and Present, Frederick May Foundation of Italian Studies, University of Sydney, Sydney, 1983, ch. 4; and O. F. Hamouda (ed.), Controversies in Political Economy. Selected Essays of G. C. Harcourt, Brighton, Wheatsheaf Books, 1986, pp. 75–89.