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Sraffa’s System in Relation to Some Main Currents in Unorthodox Economics

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Sraffa and the Reconstruction of Economic Theory: Volume Three

Abstract

If one asks the question ‘How is Sraffa’s book, and the system of theory contained within it, related to the scope and content of economics as a whole?’, the answer, on one level, seems clear and obvious half a century on. On the one hand, it reconstructs with a new coherence at least a foundational element of classical economics, a tradition running from William Petty and Richard Cantillon to David Ricardo and Karl Marx, and beyond. On the other, that same system of theory entails a critique of the marginalist approach to the theory of functional income distribution, insofar as the latter relies upon well-behaved substitutability between ‘factors of production’ for generating demand functions for factors. Absent that supply-and-demand approach to factor pricing, the supply-and-demand approach to commodity prices and quantities also collapses (Garegnani, 1983).

I am indebted to R. Ciccone, M. Lavoie, A. Stirati and G. White for comment, without thereby implicating them in the final product.

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Authors
  1. Tony Aspromourgos
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Roma Tre University, Italy

    Antonella Stirati

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© 2013 Tony Aspromourgos

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Aspromourgos, T. (2013). Sraffa’s System in Relation to Some Main Currents in Unorthodox Economics. In: Levrero, E.S., Palumbo, A., Stirati, A. (eds) Sraffa and the Reconstruction of Economic Theory: Volume Three. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137314048_2

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