Sraffa, Piero

(1898–1983)

   An extremely influential economist who was a close friend of both John Maynard Keynes and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sraffa was born in Turin to an academic family. After taking a degree in economics under the supervision of Luigi Einaudi, he worked as an academic in Italy. Sraffa was both a personal friend and political associate of Antonio Gramsci, and his position in the mid-1920s in Italy was by no means safe. Keynes accordingly arranged for him to be brought to England as a lecturer at Cambridge. Somewhat diffident in personality, Sraffa did not enjoy lecturing and, thanks to Keynes’s intervention, subsequently became librarian of Kings College, Cambridge, and editor of the collected works of the 19th-century economist David Ricardo. It took Sraffa 20 years to complete his edition of Ricardo’s works, but the final result, with his introductory essay on Ricardo’s thought, was regarded as a definitive statement on Ricardo and on classical economics more generally. Sraffa, who would have fared ill under modern academic requirements to “publish or perish,” finally produced a short book of his own in 1960. The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities opened up a wide-ranging debate in academic economics and ensured his reputation as one of the most original of all contemporary economists. Sraffa was also a shrewd practical economist. He invested in Japanese government bonds after the war and made a fortune. Sraffa was an intellectual of acute sensibility and broad interests. He was well able to discuss philosophy with Ludwig Wittgenstein, who wrote in the introduction to Philosophical Investigations, one of the most important works of philosophy of the 20th century, that he was “indebted” to Sraffa’s “stimulus” for “the most consequential ideas of this book.” Sraffa was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and died in England in 1983.