ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Sraffa's Lectures on "Advanced theory of value" 1928-1931
Author: Trezzini Attilio
For three consecutive academic years, Piero Sraffa held in Cambridge the Lectures on "ADVANCED THEORY OF VALUE". Invited to lecture on the topics of the articles of 1925 and 1926, in preparing these lectures, as explained by Garegnani in his seminal work on the unpublished Sraffa’s manuscripts , Sraffa underwent a radical change in his theoretical positions. The Lectures are an interesting testimony on the relevance of this turn and on what was still incomplete in the process which has led Sraffa to his fundamental contribution. In a first part of the Lectures, certainly the most innovative, Sraffa describes the evolution of the notion of cost from that of Classical Political Economy — which underwent a slow and not substantial transformation - to that of the marginalist theories - in which it is however possible to detected different positions. In this part we find the awareness of a radical difference between the classical and the marginalist approaches to the theory of value. Sraffa criticizes Marshall’s position arguing that it represents an incoherent attempt to keep together elements of the classical tradition and the notion of cost proper to marginal theories. At that time, Sraffa seemed not to link the differences in the theories of value to the corresponding differences in theories of income distribution. In this regard, while he captured subtle elements of difference, he neglected the radical differences in the determinants of the distributive variables. The second part deals with the issues addressed in the 1925 and 1926 articles. Meaningful differences can be found in the Lectures in the way the issues are treated. The themes of the 1925 article are connected, in the Lectures, with the more general criticisms developed with respect to Marshallian notion of cost put forward in the first part. The same issues are developed in the Lectures in a clearer and more rigorous form with respect to the articles. In the last part of the lectures Sraffa briefly discusses the general equilibrium formulations of marginalist theories. After a rigorous exposition, didactically effective, Sraffa indicates possible lines of critical reflection. These appear however tentative and far from the powerful criticism that will originate from Sraffa’s subsequent work.
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