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Introduction Over the past fifty years or so we have seen a veritable fragmentation of economic theory. Research has ramified in different directions and its very foundations – methods and techniques of analysis, crucial concepts and simplifying assumptions, central problems – have undergone broad diversification. This has led to a division of labour among substantially autonomous groups of economists who often ignore, or in any case do not take into account in their own research, what happens in other areas of research. This trend has been reinforced by the high level of technicality that, together with diversification in the techniques of analysis, makes the studies required for any given field of research increasingly specific and time-consuming. For instance, the new evolutionary theories of the firm have no relation to research on the microeconomic foundations of macroeconomics; it would be quite difficult to find some common ground between research on the institutional evolution of financial markets and the so-called ‘new growth theory’ which seeks to make technical progress endogenous to the theory itself. Economists become ever more specialised and increasingly limit their readings and their professional contacts to researchers active in the same field and pursuing a similar research orientation; increasing numbers of specialised journals and professional societies are created; the very processes of academic selection favour the fragmentation of economists into separate corporations. It is thus quite difficult, in this situation, to provide a reasonably balanced and complete illustration of the different streams of economic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

First writings: money and banking Piero Sraffa (1898–1983) is one of the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century: not only for his strictly economic contributions, but also for his influence on others, from Antonio Gramsci to Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the field of economic sciences, Sraffa's cultural project is an extremely ambitious one: ‘to shunt the car of economic science’ in a direction opposite to that indicated by Jevons, one of the protagonists of the ‘marginalist revolution’. With his writings, in fact, Sraffa aims to expose the weak points of the marginalist approach as developed by, for instance, Jevons, Menger, Walras, Marshall, Böhm-Bawerk, Hayek and Pigou and at the same time to repropose the classical approach of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and, in certain respects, Karl Marx. In order to better understand its nature and impact, it may be useful to follow the gradual development of this cultural project, from the first writings on money and banking to the edition of Ricardo's works and the small but dense volume on Production of commodities by means of commodities (1960). Piero Sraffa was born in Turin on 5 August 1898. His father, Angelo Sraffa (1865–1937), was a well-known professor of commercial law and subsequently (from 1917 to 1926) Dean of the Bocconi University in Milan. Following his father as he moved from one university seat to another, the young Sraffa studied in Parma, Milan and Turin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction The economic organisation of the local utilities in gas, water, tramways and electricity which emerged in the nineteenth century involves issues of natural monopoly as well as of public health and safety. They provoked a stream of outstanding reports by Royal Commissions and Select Committees. There has however been only a small academic literature addressed to questions of economic organisation and two central issues which have, as yet, only been briefly addressed are analysed in this paper: one is the nature of the natural monopolies in gas and water, the other is the form which public control took. There seems to be a broad consensus in the literature that the question of municipally provided services was one assessed in nineteenth-century Britain in pragmatic rather than political or ideological terms. Waller (1983, p. 300) called it municipal capitalism in contrast to municipal socialism which Kellett (1978) and others have associated more with the debate on London government and with the period from the turn of the century. There were specific problems arising in the provision of gas and water supplies in the mid nineteenth century by which time many areas had only one supplier. The monopoly issue was one source of concern, and the ‘adequacy’ of supplies was another. For Falkus (1977, pp. 145–6) and Robson (1935, pp. 309–10), authors of perhaps the best-known scholarly articles on the economic history of municipal trading, these were the key issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long after all participants have passed on, the Victorian economy continues to exercise powerful influences, both open and concealed, over economic policy and attitudes, as well as through the legacy of economic structure. Perceptions of how the economy worked and how well, form the background to a number of present-day concerns. Economists allude to the Victorian economy as a period of competition in opposition to today's oligopolistic industry, social commentators contrast the provisions of the modern welfare state with the inequalities generated by Victorian laissez-faire, and Mrs Thatcher appeals to Victorian values to provide the social cement necessary to bind society together. The later Victorians were more prone to question their society than their mid-century forebears. British industry was more often described as uncompetitive (Williams 1896, Stead 1901) and social reformers (Mearns 1883, Booth 1902, Rowntree 1902) provided evidence for criticising the distribution of the gains from their expanding industrial society. Criticism has continued ever since. On the side of production, the Victorians have been blamed for dissipating the head start of the industrial revolution, and neglecting opportunities to lay the foundation for an advanced, technological, competitive British economy in the twentieth century. Inadequate attention to education and industry and too much concern with class, leisure and empire slowed economic progress, while the more vigorous Germany and the United States overtook Britain (Wiener 1981, Barnett 1986). Victorian and Edwardian economic structure was a poor inheritance for the later twentieth century (Crafts 1985). An increasing commitment to the world economy concentrated the British economy on the production of goods from a few sectors, the market and technological prospects for which were not bright. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]