scholarly journals PIERO SRAFFA: UN ECONOMISTA SCONOSCIUTO?

Author(s):  
Pier Luigi Porta

This note outlines essential elements for reconstructing the intellectual route followed by Piero Sraffa on the basis of archival documents dating from the second half of the 1920s. These documents highlight Sraffa’s interest in Marx’s lack of success in linking his theoretical contribution to the reconstruction of its precedents in the history of political economy. Archival documents illustrate the formative phase of Sraffa’s scientific programme and show his intention to build a new theory starting from its premises in the history of economic analysis. Sraffa’s subsequent abandonment of the historical-analytical approach confirms Luigi Pasinetti’s view that Sraffa had to shelve an initial programme of great vastity and ambition to reduce it within feasible limits, of which his ‘equations’ are a characteristic feature.

Author(s):  
Joanna Innes ◽  
Michael J. Braddick

The Introduction offers a brief overview of Paul Slack’s contribution to early modern history, distinguishing between an earlier phase concerned with social policy and the ideas which informed it, and a later phase concerned with the history of political economy, and particularly the shifting discourse of happiness which, he argued, informed it. It then explores recent interest in the history of emotions, distinguishing a variety of approaches to that subject. Reviewing three broad approaches taken by the contributors to the volume, it goes on to suggest that the history of emotions is most stimulating when seen as a focal point for different kinds of history rather than as a discrete subject of enquiry. A further implication is that a variety of forms of expertise need to be brought to bear.


Author(s):  
Alessandro Stanziani

The history of political-economic thought has been built up over the centuries with a uniform focus on European and North American thinkers. Intellectuals beyond the North Atlantic have been largely understood as the passive recipients of already formed economic categories and arguments. This view has often been accepted not only by scholars and observers in Europe but also in many other places such as Russia, India, China, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire. In this regard, the articles included in this collection explicitly differentiate from this diffusionist approach (“born in Western Europe, then flowed everywhere else”).


1994 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingrid H. Rima

The popular view among many contemporary economists is that our predecessors were literate but not numerate. Their myopia is curious to those who have the benefit of greater historical perspective. Many early practitioners of political economy can be credited with recognizing that, by their very nature, the problems in which they were interested required them to measure, quantify and enumerate. From the seventeenth century onwards, inquiring minds had already learned to distrust information and ideas that derived from the then traditional qualitative approach to science, which described the sensations associated with objects and events. William Petty's Political Arithmetic is a case in point; it aimed not simply to record and describe reality in terms of


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