Abstract
One of the main concerns of a historian of economic thought is with traditions or streams of thought. Even if we accept some kind of ‘relativist’ hypothesis in our interpretation of the economic thought of different historical periods, it remains true that there are always important elements of continuity in the development of thought within any particular period — and even (up to a point) from one period to another — which are bound to be of interest to historians. And since nobody can tell where a particular stream is flowing until it actually gets there, this means that each generation has to rewrite the history of economic thought in the light of the new point which it finds the stream has reached.
This essay is an amended version of a paper which was originally given at a conference of the History of Economics Society held in Chicago in May 1973, and subsequently published in History of Political Economy, 6, 1974, pp. 246–60.
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References
Piero Sraffa, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (Cambridge University Press, 1960).
J. A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (Allen and Unwin, London, 1954), p. 1054; and cf. also p. 98.
Ibid., p. 1054.
Ibid., p. 302.
Ibid., p. 98.
Ibid., pp. 474, 560, and 568.
W. S. Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy (4th edition, Macmillan, London, 1931), p. Ii.
Schumpeter, op. cit., p. 601.
Ibid., p. 189; and cf. also p. 472.
Ibid., p. 552.
Ibid., p. 918.
Ibid., p. 552.
See above, pp. 18 ff.
Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (edited by R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, Oxford University Press, 1976), Vol. I, p. 37.
Schumpeter, op. cit., pp. 968–9.
Ibid., pp. 925 and 968.
On this point, see the very interesting discussion in Maurice Dobb’s Theories of Value and Distribution since Adam Smith (Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 1–15.
See ibid., pp. 112–15.
Ibid., p. 112.
Cf. ibid., p. 20: “A general equilibrium ‘model’ of an economy is at least unlikely to be forthcoming until the growth of market relations and of economic mobility has reached the level of development that they had begun to do in mid-nineteenth century England.”
Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of PoliticalOeconomy (London, 1767), Book II, Chap. 4.
Jevons, op. cit., p. xxxi (my italics).
Malthus, Principles of Political Economy (2nd edn., London, 1836), p. 71.
Cf. above, pp. 16–17.
Schumpeter, op. cit., p. 557.
Cf. R. L. Meek, Studies in the Labour Theory of Value (2nd edition, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1973), pp. Iv–vii, where this point is developed (in a slightly different context) and the appropriate references are given.
Wealth of Nations, Vol. I, p. 72.
Ibid., p. 162. Rent, of course, as the context of this statement shows, was regarded by Smith as price-determined rather than price-determining.
Schumpeter, op. cit., p. 601.
As already noted above, a certain impetus was given to the development of such theories by the terms in which Smith had conducted his discussion of the interdependence of economic quantities.
Works of David Ricardo, edited by P. Sraffa, Vol. VIII (Cambridge University Press, 1952), p. 279.
This fact did worry James Mill: see the latter’s Elements of Political Economy (3rd edn., London, 1826), p. 98.
Malthus, Principles, p. 78. Cf. Ricardo’s interesting comments on this in Works, Vol. II, pp. 52–3.
Works, Vol. IX, pp. 83 and 100.
Ibid., Vol. VIII, p. 344.
Works, Vol. I, p. 49.
M. H. Dobb, op. cit., pp. 116–17, 177–8, and 258–9.
Pp. 105–10.
Above, pp. 118–19. The Bortkiewicz—Winternitz model can of course be regarded as a special case of this Seton-type model — the case in which k13, k23, and k33 are all equal to zero.
See above, p. 132.
It can readily be shown that there is a simple relationship between the average rate of profit in the economy as a whole on the one hand, and the rate of surplus value in the production of the standard commodity on the other hand. (Cf. R. L. Meek, Economics and Ideology and other Essays, pp. 175–8; and J. Eatwell, ‘Controversies in the Theory of Surplus Value: Old and New’, Science and Society, 38, 1974, p. 301). It can plausibly be argued that this is essentially the same kind of relationship as that which Marx postulated between the average rate of profit in the economy as a whole and the rate of surplus value in the production of the commodity produced by capital of average organic composition. Before too much emphasis is given to this point, however, I think it should be borne in mind that the model with which Marx himself explained the transformation of values into prices in Vol. III of Capital was one in which the organic composition of none of the commodities concerned was equal to the social average (cf. above, p. 106). It was only later in his exposition, after he had done all the donkey-work, that he drew attention to the relationship just mentioned. And his main purpose in doing so, I think, was to prepare the way for his discussion, in Chap. XI of Vol. III, of ‘Effects of General Wage Fluctuations on Prices of Production’ — i.e., of the problem of the apparent contradiction between ‘values’ and prices in the form in which it appeared to Ricardo. The analogy in question, therefore, seems to me to be rather more relevant to the question of the connection between Sraffa and Ricardo than to that of the connection between Sraffa and Marx.
Cf. above, p. 131.
Sraffa, op. cit., p. vi.
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© 1977 Ronald L. Meek
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Meek, R.L. (1977). Value in the History of Economic Thought. In: Smith, Marx, & After. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7303-0_8
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