In 1927, when the thirty-year-old Sraffa arrived in Cambridge, Anglo-Saxon economics was dominated by Marshall’s thought. Morever, both in Europe and America, one or another form of marginalist economics held undisputed sway—with its subjectivist theory of value and its anti-socialist implications. Sraffa himself had recently become notorious in the Anglo-Saxon world, having published in a 1926 number of the Economic Journal an article criticizing Marshall’s theory of value. But the first reactions to this work already clearly showed the need to go deeper: that is to say, to combine the critique of marginalist theory with a reconstruction of the alternative approach of the classical economists and Marx. A research undertaking of more than thirty years first took shape during this period. It was to result in Production of Commodities by means of Commodities (1960) and a few years earlier (1951–5) in Sraffa’s edition of the works of Ricardo, the greatest of the classical economists.
These two projects went hand in hand, complementing each other. In Production of Commodities, Sraffa not only laid the basis for a critique of marginalist value-theory, but thoroughly resolved an analytical problem with which the classical economists had grappled in vain, and which had been tellingly used against them by their adversaries. This is the problem of determining the prices of production and the relationship between these prices and the intervening variables: wages and the rate of profit. With his edition of Ricardo’s works, Sraffa re-presents the classical economic approach based on the concept of surplus, rescuing it from oblivion and from the misleading interpretations made current by the marginalist school.