ABSTRACT
I want to talk about three great economists and I want to make my principal theme the role of the (classical) concept of centres of gravitation in their work. There are a number of obvious connections between the three – they are (were) all Cambridge economists, and both Sraffa and Keynes spent much of their professional life using, amending, criticizing, overthrowing and/or evaluating Marshall’s work. Thus Sraffa’s 1925 paper and, especially, his 1926 paper were specifically directed to a critique – a devastating one, I would say – of Marshall’s contributions to value theory. Sraffa (1930: 93) makes this perfectly clear:
We seem to be agreed that [Marshall’s] theory cannot be interpreted in a way which makes it logically self-consistent and, at the same time, reconciles it with the facts it sets out to explain. Mr. Robertson’s remedy is to discard mathematics, and he suggests that my remedy is to discard the facts; perhaps I ought to have explained that … I think it is Marshall’s theory that should be discarded.
