ABSTRACT
The year 1998 was the centenary of Piero Sraffa’s birth. Sraffa was born on 5 August 1898 in Turin; he passed away on 3 September 1983 in Cambridge.1 He became known essentially for the following contributions to economics: first, his discussion of the bank crisis in Italy and the involvement of the Fascists in it (Sraffa 1922); second, his analysis of the foundations of decreasing, constant and increasing returns in Marshall’s theory and his critique of partial equilibrium analysis (Sraffa 1925, 1926); third, his critique of Friedrich August von Hayek’s monetary overinvestment theory of the business cycle (Sraffa 1932a, b); fourth, his edition, with the collaboration of Maurice H. Dobb, of The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo (Ricardo 1951-73); and, fifth, his book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, which laid the ground for a critique of marginalist theory in the so-called Cambridge controversies in the theory of capital and distribution in the 1960s and 1970s (Sraffa 1960). He published a few other short papers and comments, an obituary of Maffeo Pantaleoni, and edited, together with John Maynard Keynes, An Abstract of a Treatise on Human Nature, whose author he identified as David Hume (see Hume 1938). In 1961 Sraffa was awarded the Söderström gold medal by the Swedish Royal Academy for the Ricardo edition.2
