Notes
1 Roncaglia reiterated these statements in Roncaglia (2009).
2 The catalogue now typically used is the one elaborated by Jonathan Smith, archivist of Trinity College Library; see http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/SRAFFA.
In the following, all references to Sraffa’s papers are to it and the labeling convention it uses.3 He inserted a note written in all probability in the same period, which reads, “Perhaps the two questions are better enunciated thus: (1) differences in value of two commodities at one time (2) changes in value of one commodity at two times (value in terms of commodities in general: whence Ricardo’s troubles for finding an ‘unchanging measure of value,’ which in the first question is not involved.)”
4 In the margin he adds, “including wages, or not?”
5 When Sraffa at the beginning of the 1940s discovered that Bortkiewicz (1906, 970-71) had enunciated essentially the same principle, he henceforth spoke of Bortkiewicz’s “dictum”; see Gehrke and Kurz (2006, 115-18).
6 The reference is obviously to Russell (1927).
7 He reiterated this characterization on March 7, 1821; see Ricardo (1821, 85).
8 As Sraffa put it in a note written “after 1927” (and probably in 1930, after Sraffa had been appointed to the editorship of Ricardo’s works and correspondence), “we are looking for the objective ground of value, and not for what the producers or their accountants, or the economists regard as sensible” (Sraffa Papers, D3/12/7/27). This specification of the aim of his investigation is to be found in the context of a critical discussion of the labor theory of value.
9 When Pantaleoni died in 1924, Sraffa published an obituary in The Economic Journal signed as P S. (Sraffa, 1924), in which he called him “the prince” of economics in Italy—a characterization with ambivalent meanings, including a reference to the prince in Machiavelli’s treatise Il Principe.
Pantaleoni had contributed an important essay on the role of power in economics and on the relationship between the strong and the weak (Pantaleoni, 1898). He was a towering figure in Italian economics around the turn of the century. A propagator of Marshallian economics in Italy and a staunch advocate of markets and competition, he toward the end of his life leaned toward fascism.10 English translation: “Therefore the reason to focus attention only on the utility of things as a function of their consumption, and not also on their utility as a function of our needs and wants or a function of their physico-chemical properties, rests exclusively with the greater fecundity of this concept.”
11 We here ignore that possibility that some fractions of the amounts of inputs will not enter in full the output, but get dissipated into the environment.
12 This is just another example reflecting Sraffa’s vivid interest in whether and what the natural sciences had to offer to the economist who sought to elaborate an objectivist or materialist approach to the problem of value and distribution. If Dalton’s atomic theory could be applied in a straightforward manner to economics, which according to Sraffa it could not, the commodity composition of each and every “thing” would be knowable and fixed, and production at any point in time would always reflect this composition. A sequence of instants, that is, a period whatever its length, would not give a different picture of chemical compounds. It would always be true, for example, that 2H2 + 2O would give 2H2O. In this case the distinction between short and long run would not add anything to our understanding. However, in economics things are different precisely because an economy that gravitates toward a costminimizing long-period position typically changes the way in which commodities are being produced and thus the commodity composition of inputs that enter them. This is so, because in the short period the methods of production actually employed are typically not fully adjusted to the other data of the classical approach to value and distribution (real wages and gross output levels).
13 English translation of the Italian phrase: “essentially physiocratic point of view that value is a quantity that is intrinsic to the objects, almost a physical or chemical quality.”
14 In Sraffa (1960, 3) we will eventually read that the values solving the first equations “spring directly from the methods of production”; in his papers he also used the (Ricardian) term “absolute values” with regard to the case under consideration.
15 It deserves mention that this idea was still present when in the summer of 1942, Sraffa, after having read his old notes, resumed his constructive work and jotted down a list of topics (regarding the planned contents of the book he was to write). It contains, among other things: “2) With profits—everything a necessity.” (Sraffa Papers, D3/12/15/1)
16 For a discussion of the steps Sraffa took as a consequence of this, see Kurz and Salvadori (2005), Gehrke and Kurz (2006) and Kurz (2012).
17 Interestingly enough, the uniqueness of the standard commodity is here related only to its role as an invariable measure of value, but this is suggested as a way to understand the latter, that is, a way to relate it to a practical consideration and not to the abstract tool that is used to prove many of the propositions in the first part of the book.