ABSTRACT
Introduction This paper deals with (one of) Piero Sraffa’s great passion(s): Sraffa loved to engage in detective work, in particular if bibliographical or philological points were involved.1 And he was exceptionally good at it. Evidence for this may be found in many of his published writings, for instance, in his brief note entitled “An alleged correction of Ricardo” (1930), in the “Introduction” to David Hume’s An Abstract of a Treatise of Human Nature (1938 [1740]), published jointly with Keynes, and, of course, in the introductions and editorial notes of his magnificent edition of The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo (195173).2 Here the best-known examples of Sraffa’s extraordinary detective abilities are perhaps his explanation of the double-numbering of chapters in the first edition of the Principles (Works I: xxiv-xxx), his refutation of Silberling’s allegations (Works X: 91-4), and his identification of “Mr –––, a Continental merchant” (Works III: 427-34). The following sections report on some further results of Sraffa’s detective activities during his work on the Ricardo edition which up until now have been largely unknown. This is due to the fact that in some cases these activities only led to definitive results when it was already too late for inclusion in the edition, while in other cases Sraffa deliberately refrained from publishing his findings or did not succeed in producing conclusive evidence. The main purpose of the paper is to illustrate by means of some little examples what scholars who are interested in Ricardo may expect to find in the folders relating to the Ricardo edition (mainly folders D3/11/1-D3/11/240) in Sraffa’s papers: no sensational interpretive findings on Ricardo’s economics that have remained unpublished, but rather a vast amount of information on bibliographical, archival and other literary sources that were explored by Sraffa. The examples presented below are also meant to show Sraffa’s meticulousness in tracking down a problem until conclusive factual evidence had been found. Due to limitations of space this paper can provide only a rather impressionistic sketch of a very small part of Sraffa’s editorial work. Readers interested in a more comprehensive summary account of the gestation of the Ricardo edition are therefore advised to read the paper by Annalisa Rosselli (2001).3
