Was It a “Fatal Error”? Sraffa and Samuelson on Marshall's Partial Equilibria Method

Abstract

Samuelson commented several times on Sraffa’s 1926 Economic Journal paper, while for presumably linguistic reasons he never commented on the 1925 Italian article, which was translated into English only in 1998 (Sraffa [1925] 1998). He eventually consid ered the conclusion Sraffa reached in the first part of his 1926 Economic Journal paper an error (see Samuelson 1987, 1990a, 1990b, 1991) and did not change his view even when Eatwell (1990), Garegnani (1990), Schefold (1990), and Panico (1991) brought to his attention the fact that his and Sraffa’s analyses were quite similar. In this article we pursue the following aims. We 1. highlight similarities and differences between Sraffa 1925 and Samuelson 1971, 2. reconstruct the evolution of Samuelson’s thought concerning Sraffa’s 1926 critique of Marshallian economics, 3. obtain new insights from Sraffa’s unpublished manuscripts about Sraffa’s thought on the role and signif­i­cance of the constant costs case within Marshallian economics, 4. take account of a change in Sraffa’s assessment of Marshallian par tial equilibrium methodology that took place in the second half of the 1920s,1 and 5. reconsider the previous debate on these issues in the light of unpub lished documents that were not available at the time of the debate.