Introduction:

One might describe Piero Sraffa as "one of the greatest economists and deepest thinkers of the twentieth century" (Kurz) or "one of the most remarkably clear minds of the twentieth century" (Pasinetti). Most definitely, he ranks among the greatest in the guild of economists. Even though his biggest achievement, in my personal opinion, which will stay unquestionable for generations to come, are his years of editorial work that produced the most complete edition of The Works and Correspondences of David Ricardo.

Sraffa’s main own publication is a small slender volume, a condensate of economic theory, which entailed a lot of turmoil and discussion: Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960). Maurice Dobb called this "an epoch-making book" and probably rightly so. In the opinion of Joan Robinson "[i]t is no wonder that this book took a long time to write" (Robinson, 1961). It models mathematically a whole economic system as a circular model in classical tradition. But compared to the classical practice, he chooses a different closure to the system – the rate of profit, which has to be determined exogenously.