Sraffa and the problem of returns: a view from the Sraffa archive

Abstract

About a quarter of a century ago, Carlo Panico and one of the authors of this chapter published a paper on ‘Sraffa, Marshall and the problem of returns’ (EJHET 1994) in which they explored links between Sraffa’s mid-1920s critique of Marshallian economics and the analysis developed some 35 years later in Production of Commodities. The 1994 contribution focused exclusively on Sraffa’s published works since his unpublished manuscripts were not yet freely accessible. With the benefit of hindsight, it may be claimed that Sraffa was a scholar who, during his lifetime, published little but wrote a lot (Kurz, 2008). Hence, when in December 1994 Trinity College Cambridge, UK, opened the Sraffa Archive, a huge amount of hitherto unknown material became available to the scientific community. Our aim in this chapter is to reconsider some of the results achieved in the 1994 contribution in the light of the new evidence provided by Sraffa’s manuscripts. The 1994 paper investigated four issues: (i) the chronological development of Sraffa’s thought in the second half of the 1920s, (ii) the analysis of the firm in the 1920s and in 1960, (iii) the determinants of variable returns in the 1920s and in 1960 and, finally, (iv) interdependence among sectors and the assumption of given quantities. In this chapter, we focus on the last two issues since, as regards item (ii), we were not able to find elements of interest in the Sraffa Archive while Garegnani (2005) and Kurz and Salvadori (2005a) have provided a thorough scrutiny of unpublished material related to item (i).