The First Interlude

Abstract

On Keynes’s initiative, Sraffa was appointed the editor of the Royal Economic Society’s project of publishing the works and correspondence of David Ricardo in 1930, and in September 1931 Sraffa’s three-year teaching contract at Cambridge University ended. After this, Sraffa stopped lecturing and apparently turned all his attention to the Ricardo project. Strangely enough, at this juncture, there is almost a complete break in Sraffa’s notes for a full decade. Apart from several drafts of his review of Hayek’s Prices and Production, his reply to Hayek’s response and one small note on language (perhaps written in early 1932), we have almost nothing in his files until 1942, and not much on Ricardo either. Is it plausible that Sraffa, who was at the verge of a significant theoretical breakthrough at this time, could have simply shelved the whole project for a decade in such a way that he did not even allow himself to have any thoughts about it? Interestingly, in the ‘Preface’ to his book, Sraffa reports: ‘While the central propositions had taken shape in the late 1920’s, particular points, such as the Standard commodity, joint products and fixed capital, were worked out in the ’thirties and early ’forties’ (Sraffa 1960, p. vi). So, where are the notes from the 1930s? The matter becomes more mysterious when we find a re-occurrence of the same phenomenon after 1944, soon after the Mill–Ricardo papers were found and Sraffa had to redirect his attention to the Ricardo project once again. More interestingly, this time we do not find even a draft of his famous ‘Introduction’ to Ricardo’s Principles in his files—all we have is the galley proof of the ‘Introduction’, although we have an earlier proof of the ‘Acknowledgement’, where one can see a couple of names deleted. Thus there is no doubt that important papers are missing from the Sraffa files at the Wren Library. Could it be possible that Sraffa put most of his intellectual notes from the two decades of work mainly on Ricardo in separate files, which somehow got lost or purposely destroyed by Sraffa? The suspicion of intentional destruction becomes stronger when we find that many files relating to the Ricardo project that contain mostly non-intellectual materials such as Sraffa’s correspondence with others regarding Ricardo’s papers or his life and so on are preserved. Be that as it may. We have to work with what we have.