“Piero Sraffa’s Lectures on the Advanced Theory of Value 1928 - 1931 and the rediscovery of the classical approach”

Abstract

Sraffa's Lectures on the Advanced Theory of Value 1928–1931 and his two preparatory Notes of summer and November 1927 provide a wealth of material, up to now unpublished, for a reconstruction of the early stage of his inquiry into the cognate fields of pure economic theory and its history. The three manuscripts show that in the late 1920s Sraffa rejected the Marshallian constant-cost interpretation of classical economics, an interpretation to which he had adhered in his 1925 and 1926 papers. Moreover, in the Lectures, Sraffa presents for the first time his own interpretation of classical economics based on the concepts of surplus, physical real costs and asymmetric treatment of distributive variables.