ABSTRACT
I want to talk today about three great economists and I want to make my principal theme the role of the (classical) concept of centres of gravity 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 either using, amending, criticising, overthrowing and/or evaluating Marshall’s work. Thus Sraffa’s 1925 paper and, especially, his 1926 paper specifically were directed to a critique – a devastating one, I would say – of Marshall’s contributions to value theory. Sraffa makes this perfectly clear in his reply to D. H. Robertson in the 1930 Economic Journal symposium on Increasing Returns and the Representative Firm.
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. (p. 93)
