ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that both Adam Smith and David Ricardo, who were highly concerned with the dynamics of the system as a whole, and Ricardo who was particularly concerned with the notion of causation, fall, nevertheless, within the frame of Piero Sraffa's 'standpoint' when it comes to their theories of value. Adam Smith's theory of value is also situated in the context of a given empirical system with a well-defined physical surplus is given by the natural productivity of land that produces food over and above the given cost of used up means of production, wages and profits. The problematique of value reduces to resolving the physical surplus into the rate of profit by taking only the marginal or no-rent land into account. Furthermore, instead of taking distribution as given, Karl Marx seems to derive the law of distribution from his general theory of value — this, too, did not fit well with Sraffa's 'classical standpoint'.
