Sraffa, Sen and Non-Causal Representations in Social Analysis

Amartya Sen (2003 and 2004) has drawn attention to two aspects that are important for an understanding of Sraffa’s (1960) Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. The first (mostly at the level of enunciation) addresses the need not to separate Sraffa’s contribution as an economist from his philosophical stance, in its broadest sense, and in particular from the context of intense cultural exchange entertained with Gramsci on the one hand, and with Wittgenstein on the other. I will deal here only marginally with this issue,1 focusing rather on the second aspect, concerning the distinction between causal models of scientific explanation and schemes of ‘analytical determination’, i.e., non-causal representations (or descriptions). An example of the former, according to Sen, is the ‘causal determination’ of the marginalist theory of prices. An example of the latter is Sraffa’s scheme, in which inputs and outputs are fixed, ‘as in a snapshot of production operations in the economy’.2 Sen’s conclusion is that, by adopting a method corresponding to the second approach, from the start Sraffa would give up the attempt to construct a theory of prices and distribution alternative to marginalist theory. So would his contribution be of no use in constructive terms? Sen rejects such a drastic conclusion, arguing (or conceding) that this method encouraged the classical political economists and Marx to expand the area of interest for economists, proposing, albeit in a ‘merely’ descriptive domain, important issues for social and political communication.