On Blaug Ten Years Later

Ten years on, Professor Blaug has returned to a subject on which his 1999 article, “Misunderstanding Classical Economics: The Sraffian Interpretation of the Surplus Approach,” stirred up lively debate. The subject is, as he puts it, “Sraffian economics,” and his 2009 paper is a “new version of an earlier effort [that] extends and hopefully deepens the argument.” The themes of his criticism of what we may call the “classical revival” opened up by Sraffa remain, however, basically the same: that the revival is defective because of some alleged overall misinterpretation of the classical economists, and of formalism in the presentation and development of the theoretical approach of those economists. If the main themes of criticism remain broadly the same, there is, however, a very important difference in that the reasonably compact analytical argument that supported the 1999 criticism disappears in the 2009 article, with little remaining to support his contention.