Piero Sraffa’s St. Simonian temptations. An examination of the Sraffa Papers

Abstract Why did Piero Sraffa (1898–1983), one of the most important economists of the 20th century, undertake such a significant—albeit never published—study of the St. Simonian texts? And to what extent does Sraffa’s evident interest underline the continuing relevance of St. Simonism today? This paper seeks to determine the exact parameters of Sraffa’s engagement with the St. Simonian school, and then with Saint-Simon himself, through two particular moments: the first comes in a lecture course that Sraffa, an Italian emigrant, gave in Cambridge from 1929 to 1930; the second concerns an apparent project to publish the works of Saint-Simon, which seemed to have consumed a significant part of Sraffa’s energies from the end of the 1950s into the 1960s. In view of the particular characteristics of these unpublished works, the paper makes some interpretative proposals.

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