New Left Review I/112, November-December 1978

Alessandro Roncaglia

The ‘Rediscovery’ of Ricardo

In 1927, when the thirty-year-old Sraffa arrived in Cambridge, Anglo-Saxon economics was dominated by Marshall’s thought. Morever, both in Europe and America, one or another form of marginalist economics held undisputed sway—with its subjectivist theory of value and its anti-socialist implications. Sraffa himself had recently become notorious in the Anglo-Saxon world, having published in a 1926 number of the Economic Journal an article criticizing Marshall’s theory of value. But the first reactions to this work already clearly showed the need to go deeper: that is to say, to combine the critique of marginalist theory with a reconstruction of the alternative approach of the classical economists and Marx. A research undertaking of more than thirty years first took shape during this period. It was to result in Production of Commodities by means of Commodities (1960) and a few years earlier (1951–5) in Sraffa’s edition of the works of Ricardo, the greatest of the classical economists.

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