The Second Interlude

Abstract

In Chap. 4, I mentioned that there are two decade-long breaks in Staffa’s notes. The second break came soon after 1944 and continued until 1955 (although in this case, a few notes written from 1945 to 1948 have survived). In the interim period, however, a major event happened. In 1951 the long awaited Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo in eleven volumes started to come out of the Cambridge University Press. Leaving aside the quality of Sraffa’s editing work, which was universally hailed as the work that set the standard for such future works and brought Sraffa the great honor of being awarded the Söderström gold medal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science,^, a notable feature of this publication was the ‘Introduction’ to volume one written in collaboration with Maurice Dobb. This ‘Introduction’ brought about a change in the interpretation of Ricardo’s Principles in a subtle but substantial way. As we have already noted in Chap. 4, there are no preparatory notes for this ‘Introduction’ available in Sraffa’s files, only the final galley-proof. Given that, in Sraffa’s own words, ‘by the summer 1940, six volumes of the present edition had been set up in page-proof, while the volume of Speeches and Evidence had reached the stage of galley-proofs’ (Sraffa 1951, p. ix), one would expect that Sraffa must have had at least a rough draft of the ‘Introduction’ ready by then. Moreover, given that Sraffa had a habit of writing several drafts of any piece he readied for publication, there is no doubt in my mind that there must have been several drafts of the ‘Introduction’ written over a number of years. As a matter of fact, in a response to Keynes’s letter of 26 March 1943, in which Keynes showed his extreme frustration with the whole project dragging on for so long, Sraffa reported that ‘of the Introductions, all those which must go in the middle of a volume are ready: the others (three of them) go at the beginning of volumes and can be printed later, on pages with roman numerals. On these I have done much work, and drafted parts over and over again: all the materials is collected, but it is the drafting of the Introductions that has been holding up the whole thing.’ (D3/11/65: 26, dated 31 March 1943). No sign of these ‘drafts’ are available in Sraffa’s files. Had any been available to us it could have given us a direct glimpse of how Sraffa’s interpretation of Ricardo evolved or changed over the two decades of the 1930s and 1940s. In any case, below I try to develop a sketch of the evolution of Sraffa’s interpretation of Ricardo over time.