Piero Sraffa - Free

36 Piero Sraffapartnered in his labours by Maurice Dobb, a Marxist economist and oneof his best friends. Keynes and Austin Robinson saw him as the onlyone who could stand up to the meticulousness and timetables (late intothe night) of the Italian economist. 20 At last, between 1951 and 1955,the now ten volumes of the Works and Correspondence of David Ricardomade their appearance, to be followed in 1973 by a painstakingly compiledvolume of indexes.After a century of near oblivion and misleading interpretations,Sraffa’s philological rigour played a decisive role in the rediscovery ofthe classical economists’ framework based on the surplus approach.When Sraffa began his work, let it be remembered, the most commonlyaccepted interpretations were those of Marshall (1890, Appendix i), whosaw Ricardo as a somewhat imprecise and limited precursor of moderntheory (in that he took account of the cost of production, i.e. supply,but not of demand in the determination of prices), and Jevons (in thePreface to the second edition of the Theory of Political Economy, 1879),who found Ricardo responsible for having perniciously diverted economicsfrom the path of true science. Given either interpretation therewas no reason to waste time on Ricardo’s works.This opinion was shared, for instance, by such distinguished economistsas Robertson and Hicks, as their correspondence with Keynesreveals. 21 Acknowledgements extended, at the most, to the ‘Ricardian’theory of rent as forerunner of the principle of decreasing marginalproductivity, to Ricardo’s theory of money and to his theory of internationaltrade based on the principle of comparative costs.Nevertheless, expectations were stirring about Sraffa’s work.Publication was signalled as imminent on a number of occasions – byLuigi Einaudi in Riforma sociale in 1931, by Keynes in his 1933 essay onMalthus, by Sraffa himself in a letter to Rodolfo Morandi in 1934, etc.In his History of Economic Analysis, published posthumously in 1954,Schumpeter expresses the hope that ‘[s]ome day, perhaps, we may seethe completion of Professor Sraffa’s comprehensive edition of Ricardo’sworks, which we have been eagerly awaiting these twenty years’. 22Such expectations were more than justified. Sraffa’s critical editionof Ricardo’s Works and Correspondence is unanimously recognised as a20On Dobb’s role in the edition of Ricardo’s Works and Correspondence,cf. Pollitt (1988).21Letter by Robertson of 3 February 1935, in Keynes (1973, vol. XIII: 504); andletter by Hicks of 9 April 1937 in Keynes (1973, vol. XIV: 81).22Schumpeter (1954: 471).An Italian in Cambridge 37model of philological rigour, and it was above all for this that in 1961Sraffa was awarded the Söderström Gold Medal of the Swedish Academyof Science. Keynes (in 1939) and Myrdal (in 1947) were Sraffa’s immediatepredecessors among the 12 recipients in the history of this prize,which has been seen as in a sense anticipating the Nobel Prize for economics,awarded only as from 1969. The ten volumes of writings, manyof which made available for the first time, together with the apparatusof notes and, in particular, Sraffa’s introduction to the first volumerestore Ricardo – and through him the whole school of classical politicaleconomy – to a central position in economic theory, freeing interpretationfrom the accretions of misleading marginalist readings. 23Let us now summarise, from our (post-1960) vantage point, Sraffa’sinterpretation of Ricardo. Sraffa stresses the importance of the notionof surplus, and of the conception of the economic system as a circularflow of production and consumption, which Ricardo inherited from analready robust school of thought: suffice it here to recall William Petty(1623–87) for the concept of surplus and François Quesnay (1694–1774)for the idea of a circular flow. 24 Ricardo’s ‘political’ interest in the cornlaws and the limits they set to accumulation led him to construct an analyticstructure which would throw into sharp relief the negative effectsof any obstacle to free trade on profits and, through them, on investmentsand growth. According to Sraffa’s interpretation, at the outset (inthe 1815 Essay on the Influence of the Low Price of Corn on the Profits ofStock) Ricardo implicitly relied on a simplified model (possibly set outin the lost ‘Papers on the profits of capital’) where a certain amount ofcorn used as means of production (seeds and subsistence wage for the23Sraffa’s interpretation of Ricardo is set out in the second part of the Introductionto the Principles (Sraffa 1951). Apart from this Introduction, as one of the leadingneoclassical economists, George Stigler (1953: 587), remarks, ‘Sraffa’s editorialprefaces and notes serve an informative, rather than an interpretive, function.[…] The editorial notes are superb. They seem unbelievably omniscient; theyare never obtrusive or pedantical; and they maintain unfailing neutrality. Theirpresence not only clarifies much of Ricardo’s work but also provides a vast fundof information on the economics of the period’.24Cf. Roncaglia (1977) on Petty, Vaggi (1987) on Quesnay, and more generallyRoncaglia (2001, Chapters 3–9), on the development and evolution of theclassical school. Cf. also Gilibert (2000) on circular flow models in 1927–37, thefirst period of Sraffa’s work on the Ricardo edition and on his 1960 book. It isworth recalling here that in 1948, advising the publisher Giulio Einaudi on aseries presenting the major works of the classical economists, Sraffa singles out(together with Marx’s Theories of surplus value) Petty, Cantillon and Quesnay(Potier 2000: 34–5).