Sraffa’s Political Economy

Piero Sraffa (1898–1983) made revolutionary contributions to economics. While his critical contributions to the Cambridge Capital Cont­roversy are relatively well known, his constructive efforts in the “Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities” (PCMC hereafter), which revived classical political economy, are not quite. The book under review, aptly titled A Reflection on Sraffa’s Revolution in Economic Theory, is edited by Ajit Sinha, who has widely published on Sraffa. This book is published under the Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought series and the contributors bring together “insights from his [Sraffa’s] archives” (p ix).

All the contributors to the edited volume have extensively engaged with Sraffa’s ideas in their previously published work. There are 18 chapters in ­total, out of which 1, 4, and 9 by Sinha, Goddanti Omkarnath, and Geoffrey Harcourt deal with Sraffa’s value theory; Chapters 2, 3, 5, 8, 11, and 13 by Roberto Scazzieri, Maria Cristina Marcuzzo and Annalisa Rosselli, John Davis, Anna Carabelli, Guglielmo Chiodi, and K Vela Velupillai engage with Sraffa’s philosophical and economic standpoint; Cha­pters 6, 7, and 18 by Yoann Verger, Ajit Sinha, and Nerio Naldi explore the aspects of Sraffa’s intellectual biography; Chapters 14, 15, and 16 by Carlo Panico, Ragupathy Venkatachalam and Stefano Zambelli, and Ghislain Deleplace examine the monetary elements in Sraffa’s economics; the rem­ai­ning Chapters 10, 12, 17 by Martins, Steenge, and Verger connect “Garegnani’s surplus equation and Marx’s falling rate of profit,” Sraffa and Leontief, and Sraffa and ecological thought, respectively. Innovatively, each chapter is foll­owed by a comment and the author’s res­ponse to that comment; I had first come across this expository structure in Krishna Bharadwaj and Bertram Schefold’s 1990 edited book of conference proceedings titled “Essays on Piero Sraffa: Critical Perspectives on the Revival of Classical Theory.”