Piero Sraffa - Free

8The Sraffa Legacy8.1 IntroductionThis chapter aims at providing a broad overview of the role played in thecurrent economic debate by the contributions of Piero Sraffa and thosecontemporary economists who joined in with his proposal of a return tothe approach of the classical economists, from William Petty to FrançoisQuesnay, from Adam Smith to David Ricardo, up to Karl Marx. To beginwith, it must be stressed that our discussion of the different positionswill not be neutral, if any discussion can be, given the present writer’sdirect participation in the debate to be surveyed in the following pages.The previous chapters considered the cultural project pursued by Sraffa:to shunt the car of economic science back on the road opened by the classicalapproach, submerged for over a century by the marginalist approach.Here we shall briefly survey the contributions offered to the culturalproject by an ever-growing number of economists since the publicationof Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities in 1960. For the sakeof clarity in exposition, we will divide the contributions into three groups:the critique of various aspects of marginalist theory, already discussedin Chapter 6; the defence and development of the classical conceptualframework reconstructed by Sraffa, in particular with his critical editionof Ricardo’s Works and Correspondence (§ 8.2); and the mathematical treatmentand extension of the analytical propositions developed by Sraffa onthe relationship between relative prices and income distribution (§ 8.3).The contributions illustrated in these sections share a commonfoundation – opposition to the marginalist approach – but they alsooccasionally display differences in the lines of research along which thereconstruction of political economy is pursued. Again for the sake of exposition,we will concentrate attention on the three main lines of researchThe Sraffa Legacy 139that appear more widely developed, at least at the present stage of thedebate, and are closely connected in particular with the names of LuigiPasinetti, Pierangelo Garegnani and Paolo Sylos Labini respectively. Moreprecisely, in § 8.4 we consider in its broad outline the ‘Ricardian’ proposalfor a reconstruction of classical political economy as developed mainlyin Pasinetti’s writings; in § 8.5 we briefly illustrate Garegnani’s ‘Marxian’proposal; and in § 8.6 we turn to Sylos Labini’s (and the present writer’s)‘Smithian’ proposal.Finally, § 8.7 offers some critical remarks on the difficulty that theproject of reconstructing classical political economy would come upagainst if either of the first two lines of enquiry were considered asautonomous and self-contained. Clearly, this section in particularreflects my personal involvement in the debate. The suggested conclusionis that the most fruitful line of enquiry for the reconstruction ofclassical political economy implies integrating within the ‘Smithian’approach some important original contributions developed within the‘Ricardian’ and ‘Marxian’ approaches.Two caveats are in order from the outset. First, reference to Smith,Ricardo and Marx to identify the three lines of research is an expositorydevice, since reference to the works of these writers holds for some aspectsbut not for others. Secondly, the differences – which should not be exaggerated– mainly concern ‘bets’ on the perspectives of the different lines ofresearch proposed for the reconstruction of economics within a substantiallycommon paradigm, that of the classical approach. On no accountshould the different lines of research be crystallised into rival schools ofthought. The term ‘Sraffian schools’, which might seem to suggest the idea,aims in fact only at countering the opposite misunderstanding, which ismore widespread and probably more dangerous, namely the idea that thereis a monolith, the ‘Sraffian school’, characterised by complete identity ofviews on the most disparate economic issues on the part of all its adherents.Independent of specific ideas on the greater or smaller potentialitiesof the three lines of research, the following pages point to the wealth ofcontributions springing from within the stream of thinking christened inturn, and always reductively, ‘Sraffian’ or ‘neo-Ricardian school’.8.2 The rediscovery of the classical approachTogether with the critique of the marginalist theory, the second objectivepursued by Sraffa – as already noted earlier – consists in re-proposingthe classical economists’ approach, freed from the misunderstandingssuperimposed on it by decades of marginalist interpretations.138