Sraffa and Modern Economics, Volume I

The aggregate neoclassical theory of distribution and the concept of a given value of capital

The lines of a more general critique

Paola Potestio

Introduction

Some years ago, in a book on The theory of production, Kurz and Salvadori (K—S hereafter) presented a reconstruction of the critique of neoclassical theory of distribution (Kurz and Salvadori, 1995). Using the main results of the debates on capital theory from the 1960s and 1970s, this reconstruction offered an opportunity to return to important aspects of those controversies that were left open in previous discussion. In particular, a crucial point of those controversies and K—S’s reconstruction deserves new consideration: the specific demonstration of the impossibility of extending the ...