Piero Sraffa - Major Works

Major Works

In 1927, Sraffa's yet undiscussed theory of value, but also his friendship with Antonio Gramsci, a risky and compromising endeavor in the context of the Italian fascist regime, considering Gramsci had previously been imprisoned, (Sraffa had brought him the material, literally pens and paper, with which Gramsci would write his Prison Notebooks), brought John Maynard Keynes to prudently invite Sraffa to the University of Cambridge, where the Italian economist was initially assigned a lectureship.

That Sraffa hated lecturing is normally explained by his shyness. But perhaps he declined teaching an economic theory he found wanting. So, he stopped collaborating in the making of Keynes' General Theory as Keynes used a subjective propensity to consume. After a few years, Keynes created ex novo for Sraffa the charge of Marshall Librarian.

Sraffa joined the so-called "cafeteria group", together with Frank P. Ramsey and Ludwig Wittgenstein, a sort of informal club that discussed Keynes's theory of probability and Friedrich Hayek's theory on business cycles. In 1939, Sraffa was elected to a Fellowship at Trinity College.

Read more about this topic:  Piero Sraffa

Famous quotes containing the words major and/or works:

    The man, or the boy, in his development is psychologically deterred from incorporating serving characteristics by an easily observable fact: there are already people around who are clearly meant to serve and they are girls and women. To perform the activities these people are doing is to risk being, and being thought of, and thinking of oneself, as a woman. This has been made a terrifying prospect and has been made to constitute a major threat to masculine identity.
    Jean Baker Miller (20th century)

    The ancients of the ideal description, instead of trying to turn their impracticable chimeras, as does the modern dreamer, into social and political prodigies, deposited them in great works of art, which still live while states and constitutions have perished, bequeathing to posterity not shameful defects but triumphant successes.
    Herman Melville (1819–1891)