Piero Sraffa (1898-1983)

Alessandro Roncaglia

Introduction

Piero Sraffa is not only one of the greatest economists of the twentieth century, but also a major protagonist in the history of philosophy and political science.¹ Born in Turin, the only son of Angelo Sraffa, a well-known Professor of Commercial Law (Bocconi University opens onto the Milanese piazza that bears his name), Piero attended elementary school in Parma, lower secondary school in Milan, and upper secondary school and university in Turin, where he graduated in law in 1920, with a dissertation (under the supervision of Luigi Einaudi) on Monetary Inflation in Italy During and After the War (privately published, Sraffa 1920).

The dissertation includes some ideas which Sraffa was later to discuss with Keynes when they first met in August 1921 and which, in my interpretation, was to exert some influence on the latter (see below). Subsequently, Keynes took the young Italian under his wing and commissioned from him an article on the Italian banking system for the Manchester Guardian Reconstruction Supplements, which he was editing. The resulting article was so good that

¹ For a more extensive illustration of Sraffas life and writings, a fuller bibliography, and a more detailed interpretation of his thought, let me refer the reader to Roncaglia (2009). Unavoidably, some points in this chapter are taken from that book. ^[1]

Keynes decided to publish it in the Economic Journal (Sraffa 1922a), requesting a shorter piece for the Supplements (Sraffa 1922b). The two articles reveal a command of institutional and technical aspects of banking, awareness of the interests at stake, and a lively interest in economic policy (indeed, in politics in general).

The second article, which shed light on the weakness of Italy’s leading commercial banks and the doubtful legitimacy of some policy measures adopted by the Bank of Italy, irritated Mussolini, who demanded recantation, without obtaining it. Keynes invited Sraffa to Cambridge, but the British government refused admission to the UK, possibly under pressure from the Fascist authorities (as Keynes thought) or because of Sraffa’s leftist leanings (as Sraffa himself tended to believe).

In the meantime, Sraffa had begun an academic career as economics lecturer at the University of Perugia (from 1923), rising to a full Professorship at the University of Cagliari in 1926. This was thanks mainly to his long 1925 article in Italian analysing and criticizing Marshallian theory, followed by a shorter one published in English in the Economic Journal in 1926, in which a summary of the critique was accompanied by the proposal of a theory of imperfect competition, which he soon abandoned but which was taken on and developed by Joan Robinson (1933) [1969] and others.

Confronted with the increasing authoritarianism of the Fascist regime (his friend Antonio Gramsci had been arrested in November 1926) and with a renewed invitation from Keynes, Sraffa moved to Cambridge in 1927, first as Lecturer, then as Director of Research, and finally as Librarian at the Marshall Library, the position most congenial to him, which he would retain for decades. His connections with King’s College date back to the time of his arrival in Cambridge; however, in 1939 he became a Fellow of Trinity College, holding the position up to his death. In the last three decades of his life he resided in college rooms, in Nevile’s Court, a point of attraction— together with his office at the Marshall Library—for Italians (including the recent President of the Italian Republic, Giorgio Napolitano) and for economists from all over the world.

Sraffa’s research programme in economics, for which he provided most of the necessary theoretical material, was to accomplish nothing less than a revolution: a shift from the marginalist to a classical approach, modified in such a way as to take into account Keynes’s contribution. He also had a significant influence in other fields, in particular through his friendship with

Gramsci and Ludwig Wittgenstein, two leading exponents of twentieth- century culture in the fields of political science and philosophy, respectively. In 1961, he received the Sodestrom Gold Medal from the Swedish Academy of Sciences, an honour shared with Keynes (who had been awarded the prize in 1939), and which constitutes the antecedent to the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Illustrating Sraffas contribution to economics without considering his broader programme could prove misleading. Notwithstanding the abstract and apparently self-contained nature of his main work, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960), it cannot be understood fully without a grasp of Sraffas world view and method,^[2] in relation to which it will be worth considering what we know of his relationship with Gramsci and Wittgenstein. This aspect will be discussed in Section 2, together with Sraffa’s contribution to the history of economic thought through his magisterial edition of Ricardo’s Works and Correspondence (published in 11 volumes between 1951 and 1973) and his representation of the economy as a circular flow of production and consumption, rather than a one-way street leading from scarce resources to the satisfaction of economic agents’ wants and desires. In Section 3, Sraffa’s critique in the 1920s of the then mainstream Marshallian approach is presented as a preparatory step to Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. Section 4 provides a brief outline of the fortunes of Sraffa’s thought. Section 5 concludes.

• [1] A. Roncaglia (*) Professor of Economics, Sapienza University of Rome, Italye-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 603 R.A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-41233-1_27
• [2] When in 1967, I asked Paolo Sylos Labini to supervise my degree dissertation on Sraffa, he requestedthat I first read Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Ricardo’s Principles, and Marx’s Capital: no small assignment,but most useful advice.