ABSTRACT
The opening of the Sraffa Archives to the general public in the late 1993 facilitated the emergence, during the last two decades, of a range of contributions dedicated to the study of the intellectual and analytical materials left by Piero Sraffa after his death and now available in the Wren Library (see e.g. the recent Special Issue of the Cambridge Journal of Economics on “New Perspectives on the Work of Piero Sraffa”; cf. Blankenburg et al. 2012). Twenty years on, some commentators on Sraffa’s economic analysis still do not consider that this new material has modified the interpretation which prevailed before the opening of the Archives and many remain convinced of the views expressed prior to the Sraffa Archives becoming publicly available by authors as different as Robinson (1965), Walsh and Gram (1980), and Hahn (1982). These views consist of two propositions: (i) Sraffa’s essential contribution is to be found in his 1960 publication Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (PCMC), and this is primarily a contribution to price theory; (ii) this contribution can be considered either as a special case of or as an alternative to the Neo-Walrasian and the Paretian theory of general economic equilibrium. Other commentators develop the opposite idea, namely, that the discovery of materials from the Sraffa Archives changed this initial interpretation of Sraffa’s contribution substantially, extending its reach far beyond the price theory. This is also our view. However, this paper is not primarily concerned with this wider debate on the meaning of Sraffa’s contribution since the opening of the Sraffa Archives. It addresses this only indirectly and focuses on the importance
attributed by Sraffa to institutions and forms of organisation in the Archives but also in his published work. The role of institutions and forms of organisation in Sraffa’s contributions to economic theory has sometimes been emphasised, but only partially so. Section 2 of this paper suggests that this aspect of Sraffa’s work should be considered an integral aspect of his overall contribution to economic theory, including his contribution to price theory. Section 3 of the paper then turns to the topics of this Special Issue,
namely, business cycles, money, and economic policy. We suggest that for Sraffa, the analysis of business cycles, money, and economic policy is not related to the benchmark of the equilibrium or the equilibrium path of a given economy, as is the case in the so-called “neoclassical” analytical tradition. Rather, for Sraffa, business cycles, money, and economic policy cannot be properly understood, so long as economic analysis does not take serious account of the fact that the economic system is not self-contained but is embedded in a given “society” (according to Sraffa’s own terminology, e.g. Sraffa 1960, p. 3) which is historically defined. This embeddedness is primarily related to the prevailing rules about income distribution that encapsulates some form of social inequality between core groups in society. This, in turn, is reflective of the institutional and organisational settings that prevail in society and that Joseph Schumpeter considered in his own way to be the object of economic sociology (Arena 2008). Two further methodological remarks are in place here. First, the Sraffa
Archives include materials dating from different time periods, and this may imply that Sraffa changed his mind in regard to specific issues he considered over time. This is certainly true, and the meaning and dates of these changes are still debated in the literature (see, for instance, Garegnani 1998, 2005; part III of Cozzi and Marchionatti 2001 including, for instance, De Vivo 2001; Pasinetti 2001; Salanti and Signorino 2001; Kurz and Salvadori 2008). However, this observation is not incompatible with the point of view we will embrace, namely, that during his academic life, Sraffa always stressed the importance of institutions, forms of organisation, and the social context and of their influence on the working of economic systems. Moreover, Sraffa never considered the economy as a closed and self-contained system, but as an open system connected with what he called the “society” in his 1960 publication. Second, our point of view also emphasises the necessity of a consistent
analytical reconstruction of Sraffian economics as yet to be achieved. This paper does not pretend to provide any such complete reconstruction but should be understood as a first step in paving the way towards this reconstruction, in what is, for the moment, an open field of inquiry. Yet, it is also far from being mere archaeology. Some of the “bricks” for this
reconstruction are already there and, in this paper, we draw attention to these. Other building blocks remain elusive and will need to be provided to complete the picture, as best this is available from the Sraffa Archives.
