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A review article of Pasinetti and Schefold’s edition of the papers at a conference in Marseilles, 1997, on the impact of Keynes in the twentieth century. The book itself is in three parts – theory; Keynesianism in European countries; and institutional discussions of Keynesian policies. The essay concentrates on the issues raised in the first part by Pasinetti, Leijonhufvud and Skidelsky. Pasinetti uses his vital distinction between principle and theory to examine why the Keynesian revolution may not have succeeded. Leijonhufvud identifies Keynes as the last of the classics, contrasting his approach with those he calls the moderns. Skidelsky asks what policies Keynes would advocate today, had he remained ageless with us.

Resurgent interest in the life and work of the Italian Cambridge economist Piero Sraffa is leading to New Directions in Sraffa Scholarship. This chapter introduces readers to some of these developments. First and perhaps foremost is the fact that as of September 2016 Sraffa’s archival material has been uploaded onto the website of the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University, as digital colour images; this chapter introduces readers to the history of these events. This history provides sharp relief on the extant debates over the role of the archival material in leading to the final publication of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, and readers are provided a brief sketch of these matters. The varied nature of Sraffa scholarship is demonstrated by the different aspects of Sraffa’s intellectual legacy which are developed and discussed in the various entries of our Symposium. The conclusion is reached that we are on the cusp of an exciting phase change of tremendous potential in Sraffa scholarship.

This essay explores certain aspects of single product industry basic systems of the type Sraffa develops in Part I of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. It focusses on triangular trade as the simplest expression of the more general n-commodity case. Two elements of the framework are explored: (i) the relation of exchange between all commodities, conceived as the configuration of exchange which is applicable to the subsistence and surplus models, and (ii) the value/price expressions of labour time, applicable to the surplus model only, which posits the productivity of, remuneration to and extraction from living labour added to the system. This analysis complements and extends the Marxian reading of Sraffa’s notions of surplus and deficit industries first explored in Carter (2014b). The methodology of ‘given quantities’ in expositing the relations developed is adopted in this essay as it corresponds to the same method employed by Sraffa. This allows readers to easily move from the present essay to Sraffa’s book and importantly his archival notes which are now for all interested parties available as colour digital images on the Wren Library website.

The first part of this article focuses on Roncaglia’s presentation of Piero Sraffa’s work and its significance for economic theory. The second part takes up some issues of content, method and interpretation of this work. It is argued that Sraffa must be put into a wider context to link him with Keynes. Sraffa and Keynes constitute the basis for elaborating a classical‐Keynesian system of political economy on a platform provided by Pasinetti’s vertically integrated labour model.

Kalecki's 1968 paper on Marx's Reproduction Schemes aimed, starting from Marxian Schemes, to build an analytical bridge to the modern theories of Effective Demand and Growth. Kalecki accomplished his task modifying the structure of Marxian Schemes, reinterpreting them in terms of vertically integrated sectors, and this sidesteps Marx's analysis of the monetary intersectoral transaction. This chapter tries to show that the impossibility of implementing the intersectoral monetary transaction is not simply due to monetary technicalities, as held by Kalecki, but has crucial implications regarding Say's Law. Putting aside Marx's problem, Kalecki puts aside the true meaning of Marx's unsuccessful analysis: that an economy obeying Say's Law cannot function; as it were, Marx's Impossibility Theorem on Say's Law.

In The Accumulation of Capital (2015a), Rosa Luxemburg emphasises the importance of demand realisation in Marx's economics. First, by studying the history of political economy a refutation is provided of the suggested harmony between production and consumption (what came to be called Say's Law) first proposed by Say and J. Mill. Second, in her analysis of Marx's reproduction schemes, Luxemburg identifies the key role of demand constraints, set in the circulation of money. Central to this analysis is how the specific peculiarities of capitalism, such as constraints on the demand for commodities by wage labour, serve to intensify problems associated with Say's Law. The main purpose of this chapter is to consider how a refutation of Say's Law can be established in Luxemburg's treatment of the reproduction schemes that featured in Polish discussions of economic reproduction.

This analysis builds on the examination of Say's Law provided by Trigg (2020) under the confines of simple commodity circulation. Luxemburg's simple reproduction scheme provides a useful starting point for extending this refutation to the arena of capitalism. Core to this approach is how commodity money undergoes wear and tear as money circulates: a phenomenon that is considered by Luxemburg introducing a new department of production for the money commodity. By developing this system, and drawing on Marx's writings in Theories of Surplus Value, part 2 (Marx, 1968), the analysis will provide a systematic exploration of Marx's inevitability theory of crises under capitalism, as an extension of the more established possibility theory of crises under simple circulation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the compatibility of Rawls's account of justice with neoclassical economic theory, upon which Rawls relies strongly.

This question is approached via a comparison of the implicit account of society and social relations adopted in Rawl's work with that that can be perceived to underly neoclassical economic theory. The purpose of this comparison is to assess how compatible these social visions are.

It is argued that neoclassical economic theory presupposes a social structure and a social reality that is radically less cooperative than that which underpins Rawls's theory of justice. Rawls presupposes a world in which cooperation is necessary – a specialised world – whereas the equilibrium requirements of neoclassical theory run into severe technical difficulties in such a context, with the result that they are assumed away via a series of theoretical contrivances, along with the role for cooperation that is central to Rawls's theory.

The paper illustrates clearly the pitfalls associated with uncritical reliance in one discipline on theoretical frameworks imported from another. Where there is debate concerning the fundamental bases of theory, a form of sensitivity analysis must be performed to ensure that the final argument does not demand too much of, or become excessively tied to, the imported framework.

The paper provides the beginnings of such a sensitivity analysis on the Rawlsian project and its relationship to economic theory, and shows that the field is open for a reconstitution of the liberal theory of justice on grounds other than its traditional ally, the exchange paradigm as represented by neoclassical theory.

This chapter argues that the Marxian theory of exploitation underlies the concepts of surplus and deficit industries that appear in Sraffa’s (1960) Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. This is seen from archival research of the unpublished papers of Piero Sraffa housed at the Wren Library, Trinity College, University of Cambridge. There it is shown that the origin of these concepts lies in the Marxian theory of exploitation that Sraffa developed regarding the notion of the ‘pool of profits’ the Italian economist utilized over a 14-year period from 1942 to 1956. The chapter engages in an extensive textual study of the archival evidence and then presents a simple analytical model of these relations.