Introduction

When I was a student, I read Alessandro Roncaglia's illustration of Piero Sraffa's contribution to the theory of prices, and some years later it was on his advice that I went to Cambridge and had a rather quick look at some of the papers Sraffa had left to Trinity College. At that time, in 1996, my interest was limited to the lectures Sraffa had delivered in Perugia at the beginning of his academic career, but following Roncaglia's suggestion, I realized how rich and fascinating the large and multifarious body of the Sraffa Papers was. Roncaglia knew very well what I would have found—between 1972 and 1975, as recorded in Sraffa's diaries, he had met Sraffa about a hundred times, he had been discussing with him his own work and Sraffa's writings and had spent many hours in his rooms, studying and ordering his papers, under his supervision.

Since that travel to Cambridge, much of my time has been taken by research on the Sraffa Papers, and what is discussed in this chapter is only one of the many themes enshrined in them. Indeed, following the very opening propositions of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, as summarized by Roncaglia in his 1975 book—“in the first instance Sraffa demonstrates that when ‘commodities are produced by separate industries’ in a system of subsistence production (‘which produces just enough to maintain itself ’), ‘there is a unique set of exchange-values which if adopted by the market restores the original distribution of the products and makes it possible for the process to be repeated; such values spring directly from the methods of production’” (quotation is from the 1978 English version, p. 4)— we are led to the focus of this chapter: was not starting an analysis of price determination, as Sraffa did in the first section of his 1960 book, from “an extremely simple society which produces just enough to maintain itself” (p. 3) quite an original departure in the history of economic thought?