Piero Sraffa and the Future of Economics. A Personal Evaluation

What conception of economic theory did Piero Sraffa have when, at the initiative of Keynes, he arrived at Cambridge in the second half of the 1920s and – with his surprisingly original initial contributions (1925 and 1926) – immediately upset the established views on political economy, dominated at that time by the leadership of Alfred Marshall’s writings? Even more importantly for us at present, what were his conceptions of the relevant direction of the evolution of economics, when 40 years later he decided to publish his famously concise, but disconcerting, book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960)? Can we infer, from his masterpiece and from his other writings, his final convictions on the relevant direction for the future of economic theory? The present paper aims at considering these questions.