How Piero Sraffa Took Up the Editorship of David Ricardo's Works and Correspondence

Abstract

In his note "Keynes on Marx's Das Kapital" (HOPE, 1983, pp. 617-20), William O. Thweatt makes an incidental remark (footnote 3, page 619) to the effect that Piero Sraffa "took over the editorship of Ricardo's Wbrks from T. E. Gregory in 1928." Thweatt's source (which he has kindly brought to my attention in a private letter) is a paper by Alessandro Roncaglia. Roncaglia's story runs as follows: "In this cultural atmosphere of 1928, the Royal Economic Society entrusted the task of preparing an edition of Ricardo's works to an economic historian mainly interested in monetary problems: Professor Gregory of the University of London. However, it did not attach very much weight to the project; and since Gregory was himself not fully committed to the undertaking, he willingly agreed to pass it over to Sraffa. (The good offices of Keynes were of crucial importance, as they had been in inviting Sraffa to Cambridge in the first place.) The Italian economist set to work with great enthusiasm and exasperating tenacity . . ." (see "The Rediscovery' of Ricardo," in New Left Review, 112, Nov.-Dec. 1978, p. 81).