Piero Sraffa: His Life, Thought and Cultural Heritage

by Alessandro Roncaglia

This important new book illuminates our understanding of Sraffa and his work in three key areas. Firstly, Roncaglia re-examines Sraffa's intellectual biography, including his friendships with Gramsci, Wittgenstein and Keynes. Secondly, the book presents a new interpretation of his main work, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. Finally, the author provides a survey of the 'Sraffian schools', bringing Italian debates on Sraffa to an English-speaking audience.

129 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Professor of Economics in the Department of Economic Sciences, University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’.

Reviews

[Juan · Rating 4 out of 5]

As the description indicates, this book deals with Piero Sraffa the thinker, not just the economist. That said, economic theory does concentrate a lot of the attention. Sraffa was an economist after all, hence the need to treat economic theory topics, but one cannot hope to understand him just by looking at his developments in economic theory. The point I believe the author wants to communicate is that much is gained by looking at Sraffa’s whole body of thought.

Be advised, nonetheless, that this is not an introduction to Sraffa. The author discusses some key ideas and notions but does not really define them, so if you have never heard of Sraffa and plan to read this book as an introduction I’m afraid it will be an onerous task. The book demands some basic knowledge of both marshallian and keynesian economics, together with some knowledge of Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. Should you decide to go through this book without fulfilling any of those requirements you will most certainly find yourself constantly stopping the reading in order to look up some unknown concept or idea.

I really enjoyed this book (specially the first and the last chapters)and would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in “neo-ricardian” and classical economics. Roncaglia really knows what he is talking about and manages to present it in a clear and straightforward way.