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About a quarter of a century ago, Carlo Panico and one of the authors of this chapter published a paper on ‘Sraffa, Marshall and the problem of returns’ (EJHET 1994) in which they explored links between Sraffa’s mid-1920s critique of Marshallian economics and the analysis developed some 35 years later in Production of Commodities. The 1994 contribution focused exclusively on Sraffa’s published works since his unpublished manuscripts were not yet freely accessible. With the benefit of hindsight, it may be claimed that Sraffa was a scholar who, during his lifetime, published little but wrote a lot (Kurz, 2008). Hence, when in December 1994 Trinity College Cambridge, UK, opened the Sraffa Archive, a huge amount of hitherto unknown material became available to the scientific community. Our aim in this chapter is to reconsider some of the results achieved in the 1994 contribution in the light of the new evidence provided by Sraffa’s manuscripts. The 1994 paper investigated four issues: (i) the chronological development of Sraffa’s thought in the second half of the 1920s, (ii) the analysis of the firm in the 1920s and in 1960, (iii) the determinants of variable returns in the 1920s and in 1960 and, finally, (iv) interdependence among sectors and the assumption of given quantities. In this chapter, we focus on the last two issues since, as regards item (ii), we were not able to find elements of interest in the Sraffa Archive while Garegnani (2005) and Kurz and Salvadori (2005a) have provided a thorough scrutiny of unpublished material related to item (i).

We clarify Blaug’s thought as well as Sraffa’s though on the relationship between rational and historical reconstructions we devote a section to the analysis of some of Sraffa’s unpublished documents concerning the reconstruction of Classical economics.

As is well known, during his life Sraffa never published a work explicitly devoted to epistemological issues. This fact should not be interpreted to indicate Sraffa’s lack of interest in such concerns. From Sraffa’s unpublished manuscripts – kept at the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, and from the books of his personal library – we see that Sraffa had a strong interest in questions of philosophy of 8science (Kurz and Salvadori, 2005). Therefore, a reconstruction of Sraffa’s epistemological theory can only be conjectural and must not leave out of consideration his unpublished manuscripts. In a previous work (Salvadori and Signorino, 2007), we analysed a specific aspect of Sraffa’s epistemology, the threefold relationship between ‘economic reality’, ‘the economist’ and ‘economic theory’, and we focused almost exclusively on the published material and used unpublished manuscripts only sparingly to show that our statements based on the published contributions were confirmed by, or at least consistent with, the unpublished material. In this chapter, we shift our attention to a somewhat related theme, the relevance of the realism of the premises in the assessment of a theory, and we make extensive use of unpublished manuscripts, while being aware of the necessary caution in using material that an author has not published. (Caution is even more significant in the case of an author such as Sraffa who is particularly careful with his choice of words and extremely reluctant to publish anything except after a long period of reflection.) u