Piero Sraffa and the Future of Economics: A Personal Evaluation

Abstract

What conception of economic theory did Piero Sraffa have when, at the initiative of Keynes, he arrived at Cambridge in the second half of the 1920s and — with his surprisingly original initial contributions (1925 and 1926) — immediately upset the established views on political economy, dominated at that time by the leadership of Alfred Marshall’s writings? Even more importantly for us at present, what were his conceptions of the relevant direction of the evolution of economics, when 40 years later he decided to publish his famously concise, but disconcerting, book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960)? Can we infer, from his masterpiece and from his other writings, his final convictions on the relevant direction for the future of economic theory?¹

The 50th anniversary of publication of Piero Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities was celebrated in 2010 by the organisation of two parallel conferences: one in Rome, by Universita Roma Tre, and the other in Cambridge, by the Cambridge Journal of Economics. These events have given me the privilege of presenting my final view of the subject of this chapter in two versions. The present version is the more leisurely one. It had started, and then followed rather closely, what I presented on another notable occasion—the centenary of Sraffa’s birth (1998), at the Einaudi Foundation of Turin, and then included in a publication by Routledge (see Cozzi and Marchionatti, 2001). The Cambridge version, shorter and compact, followed more closely another publication of mine, Keynes and the Cambridge Keynesians, published by Cambridge University Press (2007). The conclusions at which I have arrived are in substance the same, but have been presented in rather different ways, especially in the first and concluding sections of each of the two papers.

I thank Routledge and Cambridge University Press for allowing me to make free use of much of my previous versions, reshaped in the form I believe to be relevant for the purpose of each initiative.