ABSTRACT
Sraffa is no more immune to misinterpretation today than Ricardo was then. The critical part of Sraffa’s research programme is taken up essentially only in the late Pierangelo Garegnani’s contribution and then, mostly implicitly, in a number of what may be called applied economics papers, which discuss contemporary economic problems, especially the recent financial turmoil, from a non-marginalist perspective. Any serious reconstruction has to be subjected to ‘methodical discipline’. This involves, first, scrutinising the interpretation suggested against the pieces of evidence put forward in its support in order to find out whether there is indeed the alleged correspondence between the two. It involves, second, confronting the reconstruction with the complementary set of material in order to see whether it is contradicted by it and involves an illusion due to the selected material on which it is based.
