ABSTRACT
Since Classical political economy a distinction has been made between “market” prices and “natural” prices, the former reflecting the subjective and temporary forces of supply and demand, the latter determined by more objective and permanent factors, like technology and distribution. 1 Classical economists conjectured that market prices “gravitate” around natural prices, as a result of competition among capitalists, but this property is not only peculiar to Classical value theories; it was present in the first formulations of marginal analysis and it can also be discovered in some representative formulations of Neoclassical general equilibrium theory. In this chapter in Section 2 we will present briefly the basic elements of the Classical competitive process and a simple analytical formulation of this process, analogous to those presented in the gravitation literature of the Eighties. Subsequently in Section 3 we will present an intertemporal general equilibrium model with infinite horizon where market prices converge towards natural prices. In Section 4 we will examine briefly the basic logical structure of the work recently proposed by Burgstaller (1994), whose aim is to provide a more “general” framework (a sort of meta-model) able to unify Classical and Neoclassical theories of value.
