Introduction

This book (together with the second volume) collects a representative sample of work that has sprung from Piero Sraffa's two seminal contributions to economic analysis, namely the reconstruction of the core of the classical approach to value and distribution, and the foundations of a critique of the neoclassical (or ‘marginalist’) system on the grounds of the latter's treatment of capital. The chapters published here cover a wide spectrum of issues, both of a purely theoretical nature and of a more applied character. Indeed, the possibility of an explanation of distribution other than the one in terms of factor supply-and-demand equilibria, re-opened by Sraffa at the most abstract level of analysis, reverberates in the view one may hold of virtually any aspect of the workings of a market economy — including, therefore, questions more directly suggested by actual experience.