Piero Sraffa's Political Economy

A Centenary Estimate

Terenzio Cozzi, Roberto Marchionatti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780415224246
• eBook ISBN: 9781134592166
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

A century after his birth, this volume presents a re-assessment of the life and work of Piero Sraffa, one of the great economists of the twentieth century. From his anti-Marshallian articles of 1925 and 1926 to his classic work on the theory of capital, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, Sraffa's contribution to the study of economi

Part I
On Sraffa’s biography

1 A child of Cultura Positiva

Turin and the education of Piero Sraffa

Angelo d’Orsi

On 29 November 1920 in the faculty of law at the University of Turin, student number 7150 Piero Sraffa presented his degree dissertation: the title was L’inflazione monetaria in Italia durante e dopo la guerra and the supervisor was the professor of public finance, Luigi Einaudi. This was the conclusion to Piero Sraffa’s university education and the beginning of a brilliant career as both teacher and researcher. A career which kept Sraffa in Italy, via Perugia and Cagliari, only until 1927; clearly a short period but equally one which has been described as ‘probably decisive’.¹ The intention of this chapter is to analyse that adjective ‘decisive’ which Faucci (1986) used (qualifying it by a doubt which may simply have been rhetorical) to describe the influence of Turin, and more generally Italy, on Piero Sraffa. In later years, according to Luigi Pasinetti among others, Sraffa would never speak in flattering terms of his ‘garzonato universitario’ (university apprenticeship)—to use the words of another Turin University student and close friend of Piero, Antonio Gramsci.

Gramsci’s own university education, characterised by unfinished studies and difficult personal experiences, certainly differed from that of Sraffa, who, beside his intellectual ability, was the son of a university lecturer and thus a student in a privileged position. The son of a university lecturer, it should be said, from the same faculty at the same university. Born in Pisa in 1865, Angelo Sraffa graduated in law in 1888 and became a professor of commercial law at the University of Parma a few months after the birth of his son. He remained at Parma until October 1913, when he transferred to the faculty of law at the University of Turin, the city where he already resided with his family and indeed where Piero had been born on 5 August, 1898. From Turin, Sraffa senior went to Milan where, in 1919, he became Rector of the Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi. There, one year later, he founded the Istituto di Economia Politica Ettore Bocconi and appointed Luigi Einaudi as its director; Einaudi had been a faithful student of Salvatore Cognetti de Martiis who, almost thirty years earlier, had founded a sort of archetype in the Laboratorio at Economia Politica.

In general terms it would appear that beyond their individual specialisations the staff of the law faculty of Turin shared a certain awareness of real circumstance and a willingness to communicate to society at large rather than solely to academia. The historical importance of that time should not be ignored in this respect: the immediate post-war when all educated men seemed totally committed to their work. Nevertheless this awareness does seem to have been a peculiar characteristic of the University of Turin as a whole, particularly in the period between the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth. During that time in a city whose culture was above all academic there was a genuine exchange of knowledge: between different disciplines and between the world of the university and the surrounding militant culture, from the formation of associations to the actual political arena. The period nicknamed the ‘socialism of the professors’ was indeed testament to this (see Spriano 1972; Pogliano 1979; Bergami 1993). The social direction of the cultural activity would seem very much to characterise the academic world of this city, starting from, naturally, the humanist faculties, and first and foremost the faculty of law.²

The teaching of law, economics, history and political philosophy, although to differing extents depending on the subject and not always in a entirely distinct way, seemed to distance itself from the formalist tradition. If I wished to be generous, I might say that the law lecture theatres tended to advocate a society based on social awareness and civil participation rather than simply providing a professional education and supplying the job market with aspiring solicitors and legal officials. This would have been the case in particular with the fundamental courses: Constitutional Law, Public Finance, Philosophy of Law, Political Economy, History of Italian Law, Ecclesiastical Law, History of Roman Law and International Law. The faculty of law in Turin produced not only lawyers or economists or political experts, but also philosophers, men of letters, patrons of the arts and sciences, and statesmen.

Law, the chosen subject of Piero Sraffa, was the leading faculty of the university in terms of the number of admissions; it remained so until 1917– 18, when it was superseded by medicine—temporarily until 1923–24, definitively so from 1928 onwards (see Schiavone 1993). Equally in terms of the quality and notoriety of the teaching staff, law and medicine were historically the most distinguished faculties. Both schools had undergone what could almost be called a renaissance in the period immediately before the unification of the country, due in part to the influx of foreign professors, some of whom were highly renowned. This renewal, which acted as an impetus to the educational establishment as a whole, was aided and in turn helped by scientific and didactic publications on a national scale. All this took place under the general principles of a sort of positivism (although I prefer to term it cultura positiva or ‘positive culture’), of which Turin was a vital centre and even perhaps, as has been suggested more than once, the authentic capital. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century and up to the Great War (and even the immediate post-war), the academic world of this city in its widest sense, in close relationship with other civic and cultural institutions, produced its greatest results. The period immediately following, in which Piero Sraffa attended the university, saw in some sense the beginning of a slow decline; in its entirety, though, Turin still remained one of the most important university cities in the country. With regard to the faculty of law, the importance of Turin did not diminish and would not for a long time (Pene Vidari 1980; Schiavone 1993).

Much more than the faculty of literature, which was noticeably behind in terms of education, the faculty of law was a veritable intellectual centre. It should not be forgotten that many students at that time followed joint degrees (in law and literature) or frequented courses in other faculties as listeners. For a faculty somewhat outside the sphere of law, the above mentioned Laboratorio di Economia Politica and its courses were still much sought after. Cognetti’s creation crossed over the confines of the university faculties, initially working with the Museo Industriale which then became the Polytechnic in 1906 after its union with the Regia Scuola d’Ingegneria. The motto of the Laboratorio was considered to be ‘Haec placet experientia veri’—a declaration of scientific spirit and intention in the best positivist tradition. The economists of the Laboratorio identified with the Istituto Superiors di Studi Commerciali—founded in 1913 by the university, based on the Istituto Bocconi in Milan—in its practical endeavour to prepare young people for employment in commerce and related professions. More than a generation of students, and not necessarily all economists (much like the law graduates were not all destined to be lawyers), would receive an important supplementary education from the Laboratorio.³ There is perhaps little need to emphasise that for the whole of the nineteenth century and obviously not only in Turin, economics, within the bourgeois system of knowledge, had ‘the character of a principle science, in a certain sense a universal social science’ (Bulferetti 1951:122). In Turin, interest in the science of economics noticeably increased within the Accademia delle Scienze after the creation of Cognetti’s Laboratorio, which went on to employ many of Cognetti’s followers, from Luigi Einaudi to Pasquale Jannaccone.

Cognetti’s temporary successor as director of the Laboratorio (1901–3) was Gaetano Mosca, a ‘constitutionalist’ well-versed in political science and open to the influence of both history and economics. Following the illness and sudden death of Cognetti, Mosca, in memory of its founder, concentrated on the function of the institution: the Laboratorio was to be not only a school of erudite economists but also a centre for the collection of data and documents, a vital reference point for all those involved in the social sciences. An institution characterised—as Einaudi noted—by the coexistence of different political and scientific persuasions in a climate of peaceful confrontation was in fact the explicit wish of its founder (Einaudi 1901).

Two essential features emerge from Laboratorio di Economia Politica—as they do also from the faculty of law as a whole and the university in general— which appear significant in our consideration of the influence of Turin on Piero Sraffa. The first is an attitude towards society, the outside world, which may be described as interventionist, from the extra-curricular cultural activities to real political action. The second is the cultura positiva: a collection of attitudes towards learning and the formation of collective knowledge based on rigour, systematic organisation, completeness and scientific verification. A noticeably Piedmontese trait of this culture was historical-philological: verification rather than judgement, reconstruction before conceptualisation; and precise verification, exact reconstruction. Economists, lawyers and social scientists from the faculty that would also admit Piero Sraffa all placed a particular emphasis on a knowledge of history as the ineluctable basis of science (Grosso 1971).

Having started university in 1916, Sraffa was in some senses fortunate to belong for at least the first half of his degree to the corps of soldier-students: it was sufficient to attend examinations in uniform to gain the patriotic sympathy of the board of examiners, which in practice meant easy questions and high marks. A glance at Sraffa’s university career would seem to confirm something of the sort.⁴ He sat three examinations in his first year—Civil Rights Institutions, Political Economy and Statistics—which was by no means unusual, except that they were all taken on the same day, 22 October 1917, and all received maximum marks. The board of examiners was also the same each time. Its chairman was Giampietro Chironi, professor of civil rights who also taught Civil Rights Institutions. Although a disciple of formalist method and a virtual stranger to that ‘socialism of the professors’, Chironi was concerned enough about civil society and the social question to have been given political appointments alongside his academic role. Unfortunately Chironi’s credentials were not matched by the other two members of the board: Antonio Castellari, professor of Civil Procedure (a second-year course which Sraffa passed in May 1918, once again with full marks), and Francesco Cosentini, an untenured Philosophy of Law professor. In other words, the professors of two of the courses were missing for the final examination: Jannaccone (Statistics) and Loria (Political Economy), two course teachers and two economists. Thus two economic courses were examined by a board composed of three law professors on a board absent of economists.

In his second year, Sraffa sat Ecclesiastical Law and Civil Procedure on the same day, 28 May 1918. Ecclesiastical Law would seem of little significance were it not for its professor, Francesco Ruffini, conscientious historian and excellent lawyer who in the first thirty years of the century was one of the leading personalities at the university and in Piedmont society in general. Ruffini was a public personage of immense influence who, after his initial involvement in the nationalistic fervour that greeted the end of the First World War, progressively became an adversary of fascism, refusing in 1931 to swear an oath to the regime—required of all professors at that time— and thus losing his position (a fate shared by his son Edoardo, graduate of Turin and professor at the University of Perugia). Ruffini though was not part of Sraffa’s examining board on that day, which was composed instead of Castellari, as chairman, Cosentini and Federico Patetta, another formidable figure at the university who went on to become chairman of the Reale Accademia d’Italia. A fascinating character, considered a humanist—though one ‘brought up in the complete affirmation of historical method’—with a rather over-erudite conception of knowledge, Patetta was professor of history of Italian law, a course which Sraffa would pass in July 1919.

A month later, in April 1918, Sraffa sat two, more closely-associated examinations, Institutions of Roman Law and History of Roman Law, again both on the same day and before the same examiners, namely chairman Giovanni Pacchioni, professor of Roman Law and history of Roman Law, the by now ever present Castellari, and Cesare Civoli, professor of Law and Penal Procedure. In 1919, under Pacchioni, Sraffa sat one of the principal examinations, Roman Law, passing yet again with full marks. Pacchioni, who replaced Vittorio Brondi as dean of the faculty in 1919, was a notable scholar and historian of both Roman and civil law. He could perhaps best be defined as a humanist, ever ready to repulse any formalist conception of the law, of which he retained ‘the aspect most human, most profound’, according to one of his students. Within both the faculty and the entire university Pacchioni was one of the few professors with foreign teaching experience, having worked alongside Chironi at Innsbruck before coming to Turin in 1904. In 1925 he became professor of civil law at the newly-established state university in Milan; this was at the behest of Angelo Sraffa, to whose person and family he was attached by strong bonds of affection.

Sraffa senior, as already said, taught at the University of Turin; his subject, Commercial Law, was a compulsory one and thus Sraffa junior had to sit the examination. As was customary in such circumstances, Sraffa senior was not on his son’s examining board, which was composed of Pacchioni as chairman, Gino Segrè, then professor of institutions of Roman Law, and Gioele Solari, recently appointed professor of Philosophy of Law. Out of flattering respect or the subterfuge of the examiners, or perhaps simply due to the candidate’s outstanding ability in that particular subject, Piero passed with honours; somewhat disconcerting in that it represents the only honours classification in a degree curriculum which nevertheless was, as should by now be clear, still replete with maximum marks in practically every subject.

Piero Sraffa clearly learned from his opportune period as a soldier-student, and even after 1918 continued successfully to pass several examinations together. On the day he sat Commercial Law he also took full marks for Roman Law before the same examining board (Pacchioni, Solari and Segrè): it would again seem to be the case of two subjects at a single sitting. And evidently not content with his success, the following day Sraffa sat Civil Law, again before the same board; and thus Gino Segrè, one of the greatest Romanists of the time, did not actually chair, that is preside directly over, any of Sraffa’s examinations. Sraffa would have had to follow Roman Law taught by Segrè in the 1919–20 academic year, although it obviously cannot be established whether or not he actually attended classes. It is worth noting how Segrè’s work was characteristic of the repeatedly identified cultural and educational mentality of the faculty in its attention to historical fact and its defence against any formalistic abstraction.

There was nothing formalistic either, except in the sense of the exercise of formal logical reasoning, about the subject of Luigi Einaudi, Public Finance. As well as the subject’s conceptual-theoretical part, Einaudi also considered history, examining social-economic thought within concrete solutions to the fiscal and financial problems of countries, with reference to actual current situations. Einaudi was an intellectual with wide interests; besides his university career he wrote for La Stampa and then Corriere della Sera, a position certainly more important at the time than a parliamentary seat and even some ministerial posts....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• A memoir
• Part I: On Sraffa’s biography
• Part II: Sraffa’s contribution to the Cambridge debates in the 1920s and 1930s
• Comments
• Part III: Continuity and change in Sraffa’s thought
• Comments
• Part IV: Specific topics
• Comments
• Bibliography