Piero Sraffa: The Man and the Scholar

Exploring His Unpublished Papers

Heinz D. Kurz, Luigi Pasinetti, Neri Salvadori

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317997191
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Développement personnel
• Subtopic: Carrières

Previously published as special issues of The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought and The Review of Political Economy, this volume contains the papers devoted to the life and work of Piero Sraffa.

Sraffa was a leading intellectual of the twentieth century. He was brought to Cambridge by John Maynard Keynes and had an important impact on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. He received the golden medal Söderström of the Swedish Academy of Sciences for his edition of David Ricardo's Works and Correspondence and he is the author of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, one of the most often cited book in economics. Using hitherto unpublished material from Sraffa's literary heritage kept at Trinity College, Cambridge, the papers throw new light on the intellectual development of the young Sraffa and correct several of the received views on him and his contribution. Themes covered concern his:

• 
  
  

• objectivism
• rediscovery and reformulation of the classical theory of value and distribution
• criticism of Alfred Marshall's analysis
• relationship with his Cambridge colleagues and friends
• biography around the time when he left Italy for the UK
• friendship with Wittgenstein and his impact on the latter's thinking.

PART I

The Sraffa-enigma: Introduction

Luigi L. Pasinetti

You are a complete cipher to the outside world
Richard Kahn to Piero Sraffa

(borrowed from: Cristina Marcuzzo, this issue)

The place that Piero Sraffa is going to take in the history of economic thought is, at present, widely controversial. It is a fact, however, that, at two decades since his death¹, his work, thought, and life continue to be the subject matter of an increasing number of articles, books, conferences, seminars and now also of intense archival research.

The six papers that are presented in this special issue of EJHET (translated into English with some shortening, particularly in the case of Kurz and Salvadori) come from the Conference ‘Piero Sraffa’, held in February 2003 at the Academia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome.² They represent a substantial (although not complete) sample of the papers specifically concerned with the history of economic thought.

Curiously enough, the conference originated from a proposal — not by an economist, but by a mathematician, Professor Edoardo Vesentini, at the time President of the Lincei Academy. He was struck by a puzzle: How could Sraffa, who was not a mathematician and who did not even have extensive knowledge of mathematics, be able to dialogue, discuss and put into intellectual difficulties mathematicians of worldwide notoriety? What kind of mind was at work in him? Could one explain the arcane nature of his logical mode of thinking? From this genesis of the conference, the proposed initial title seemed obvious — ‘Sraffa and mathematics’. But in the course of the organization, it was enlarged to include economic aspects as well and then enlarged further to philosophical and political aspects. In the end, everything was covered by the simplest of all titles: ‘Piero Sraffa’.

In opening the conference, Professor Vesentini had a genial inkling: ‘The history of science’ — he stated — ‘is rich of crucial turning points in which decisive progress seems to emerge from the meeting of streams of studies, of lines of research, apparently far away from one another. They are moments of transition from one period of “normal science” (in the sense of Kuhn³) to another, in which for example Galileo was able to read the mathematical characters with which the “Great Book of Nature” has been written. […] The individual vicissitudes of the protagonists of these turning points […] may be seen in different, often divergent, ways […] down to the simple “natural quest for knowledge” which was so dear to Federico Cesi [the founder of the Lincei Academy] in 1616. […] The figure of Piero Sraffa is placed, in my view, in this perspective, even though with peculiar and diverse characteristics. If on the one hand the scientific contamination to which he participated appears — at least to the eyes of an outsider — to have had lesser outcomes, his life vicissitudes, both cultural and political, are far richer and more fascinating than those of so many other major protagonists’.⁴

Who was thus this Piero Sraffa, who continues to fascinate us? The nearest I can get to express a general feeling that could be perceived at, and still persists after, the conference is by saying that Piero Sraffa is an enigma.⁵ This noun encapsulates it all. I shall recall for curiosity that ‘enigma’, with all its richness of Greek literary and mythological reminiscences, was also the nickname given to a cipher machine, invented at the beginning of the last century and used to encrypt and decrypt secret messages. It was a marvel machine, according to any standard — a mix of electrical and mechanical rotors that through synchronized movements could render a message impossible to decipher unless one knew the key-code. Probably the most famous version of it was the Wehrmacht Enigma, used by the German army, during the Second World War. It gained wide notoriety when its code was eventually cracked by some European (mostly English) scientists. According to historians this discovery helped the Allies to hasten the end of the conflict. This machine fascinated the minds of engineers and scientists of different disciplines and, most of all, mathematicians. It raised simple, but very profound, questions. What is the logic with which it worked? How could it offer such complex error-free outcomes? How could the human mind penetrate or be prevented from penetrating it?

With all the necessary hedging, the life and work of Piero Sraffa raise very similar questions. The only book he wrote⁶ is notorious for its cryptic, compact yet suggestive language. Few people could immediately understand it. Its essentiality, its terse succession of absolutely necessary words or symbols, its error-free final outcomes, when finally deciphered, astonished admirers and critics and in any case have stimulated the challenge to uncover the extraordinarily variegated aspects of his intellectual life.

I thought the enigma analogy could be of some help in briefly going through at least some of the puzzles that emerge from the set of papers that are presented in this special issue of EJHET.

I will begin with, Sraffa's intellectual connections. He is one of the few economists who have left his mark on other scientific and philosophical disciplines (usually, for economists, the influence goes in the opposite direction). Sraffa's relationship with mathematicians was only one of these connections. The plain fact is that he really was a remarkable intellectual figure, by any standard. How could he exert his influence and shape the thoughts of other leading intellectual personalities? The connections between Sraffa and Wittgenstein, and Sraffa and Gramsci have attracted much attention, as is well known.⁷ The first two papers here presented, by being of a basically biographical nature, explore so-far less known paths in many of these directions. How could such a young visitor, and then immigrant, to Britain — although involved in serious family and political vicissitudes — be able to build up such a rich web of intellectual relationships? Nerio Naldi throws considerable light on this subject matter. His emphasis is mainly on the relationship of Sraffa and Keynes, seen through some important turning points in Sraffa's personal life. From this portrait, other crucial figures emerge, some of them famous, others less famous. The reader is left with a vivid picture of a rich web of relationships that seem extraordinary for a young foreign visitor. Cristina Marcuzzo concentrates her investigation on Cambridge — on Keynes and on Keynes's pupils and colleagues. This brings in another intriguing puzzle. How could Sraffa build up so quickly his intellectual stature and influence, and at the same time keep such a low profile, both within academia and outside it? Piero Sraffa is not a name that one finds systematically recalled in philosophy, in politics, even less in mainstream economics works! The Encyclopaedia Britannica does not concede a line of biography to Sraffa. Yet, at the age of thirty, in Cambridge, his authoritativeness was out of discussion. Cristina Marcuzzo helps us to understand how this low profile unfolded. Particularly significant I found the epigraph with which she opens, which I quickly borrowed. Richard Kahn's perceptive definition of the inherent attitude that characterized Piero Sraffa's demeanour is conveyed with an ambiguity that is only apparent, since in fact it covers both meanings of the same word.

There is then the more substantial puzzle of his contributions to the critique of economic theory. When one mentions this subject, the mind goes to the discussions on capital theory. But the very beginning of Sraffa's destructive contributions, on his arrival in Cambridge, concentrated on Alfred Marshall. The papers by Annalisa Rosselli and by Pierangelo Garegnani, although on a different plane and with different visions, are complementary in this respect. To think carefully of it, the task Sraffa undertakes sounds literally unbelievable. Not yet thirty, immigrant from a troubled country, he arrives in Cambridge, the birthplace of Marshall, where his Principles were the gospel for any economist (Keynes included) and he applies himself to the task of destroying the prophet, piece by piece. Annalisa Rosselli investigates very carefully the steps through which Sraffa tries, in various ways, to pin down the Master to his contradictions, and explains the reasons why in the end he gives up his efforts. But his conviction is clear. Quoting Sraffa, from the famous E.J. Symposium: ‘In the circumstances, I think it is Marshall's theory that should be discarded!’. Pierangelo Garegnani, in a carefully thought-out paper, searches for the precise point where Sraffa changes his mind in his critique of Marshall. Garegnani is interested in the other (the constructive) side of the puzzle, namely, in the way and extent to which Sraffa proceeds to re-establish solid foundations for economic theory by rehabilitating the Classical school. His firm belief was that between Quesnay, Smith, Ricardo, Marx on the one side and the Marginalist economists on the other side there was no line of continuity. There was — as Sraffa writes in one of his notes — an ‘abysmal gulf’ between the two, both in the methodology followed and in the results achieved. Garegnani proposes an interesting visual angle that makes us see, in this regard, the evolution of Sraffa's thought. The essential focus is on the theory of value, coupled with the theory of income distribution. Marshall's supply and demand apparatus is discarded, not because it should merely be purged of the subjective elements (as he had maintained before), but because it becomes unnecessary. Sraffa erects his theoretical construction on the Classical notions of ‘physical real costs’ and surplus — on an objective theory of value and income distribution. The demand side becomes superfluous. At this point, the door is open towards the way to Production of Commodities.

The final two papers, by Kurz and Salvadori and by Bertram Schefold, are both devoted to the analytically more complex part of Sraffa's book, concerning joint production and fixed capital, but from two very different points of view and with two completely different styles of enquiry. The former is relying almost entirely on archival material. Step by step, the authors try to follow the tortuous way through which the final concepts are finally arrived at: different attempts, trials and errors, involved discussions with the mathematicians. The latter is relying on the remarkable work the author has carried out on joint production, fixed capital and related subjects, during decades of research, over the whole of his distinguished career. Both papers concern, in a sense, the continuation of the second part of the above-mentioned puzzle, i.e. the one dealing with the pars construens of Sraffa's thought. Kurz and Salvadori suggest the worthiness of investigating the approach that Sraffa followed in tackling some stumbling blocks for his theory. The philosophical sophistication of Sraffa's mind emerges very clearly, jointly with his openness to trying different avenues for the solutions, and finally focusing on the route (reducing fixed capital to circulating capital), that allowed him to maintain his objectivist approach.

It is important to point out explicitly that the first five papers presented here — i.e. up to Kurz and Salvadori's — have in common the feature and merit of unearthing new documental material from Sraffa's archives. They thereby reveal new aspects of his thought and life, until now almost u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• PART I
• PART II
• Index