ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Classical Economics after Sraffa
Author: Kurz Heinz D., Salvadori Neri
After the publication of the Ricardo edition, Sraffa’s 1960 book and the opening of the Sraffa archive at Trinity College, Cambridge, our perception and understanding of the Classical economists’ approach to the theory of value and distribution has changed markedly. The paper documents in some detail using Sraffa's papers, how he arrived at his novel interpretation of the classical authors. Sraffa deserves the credit for having freed that approach from under thick layers of misinterpretation and for having shown that it had wrongly been abandoned – “submerged and forgotten” – prematurely. In particular, the Classical approach was not flawed beyond remedy, as Sraffa’s reformulation of and elaboration on it demonstrated. What is more, the Classical approach turned out not only to be rich in content and now available in a logically consistent form, it also provided a perspective or standpoint from which major deficiencies of marginalist theory could be seen, which up until then had passed unnoticed. Apparently, the development of economics does not follow a path shaped by a perfect selection mechanism that abandons anything that is erroneous and weak and keeps everything that is true and useful. After Sraffa the world in economics is no longer the same.
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