Surprise in the Archive: Reactions to Sraffa’s Papers

Jonathan Smith

Chapter 2 in Towards a New Understanding of Sraffa, 2014, pp 9-21 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract The Papers of Piero Sraffa (SP), held in the Wren Library at Trinity College Cambridge, were not made available for consultation until late in 1993, ten years after the economist’s death. Once they were opened, the papers saw a steady stream of readers eager to study his literary remains. One such was Riccardo Bellofiore, who thought he recognised in them something that he found surprising; something that did not chime with the orthodox view of Sraffa’s thought. In a paper exploring his ideas on Marx’s influence on Sraffa’s theoretical output, Bellofiore describes one aspect of his reaction to encountering the Sraffa Papers in the following fashion. ‘In my view’, he says ‘the Wren Library provides unexpected vistas of Sraffa’s landscape which partly changed my view of interpreting Sraffa’s theoretical contribution’ (Bellofiore, 2008, p. 69). He then goes on to explain that these ‘unexpected vistas’ consist of a view of the relationship between the ideas of Marx and Sraffa that did not concur with the thought of Sraffa as it was generally understood.

Keywords: Unexpected Event; Scientific Revolution; Archival Material; Dynamic Text; Jigsaw Puzzle (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-03432-8_2

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DOI: 10.1057/9781137034328_2

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