Piero Sraffa 5 August 1898 – 3 September 1983 was an influential Italian economist who served as lecturer of economics at the University of Cambridge. His book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities is taken as founding a neo-Ricardian school of economics.
Sraffa was instrumental in securing Gramsci's prison notebooks from the Fascist authorities after the latter's death in 1937. In 1924, Gramsci published a letter from Sraffa "Problems of today in addition to of Tomorrow", Gramsci published 1924 a letter from Sraffa without signing, signed S.. In the letter, Sraffa emphasizes the function of bourgeois opposition in the struggle against fascism in addition to the importance of democratic institutions for the social and political development of the proletariat. Seeing the Italian Communist Party as weak, Sraffa recommended collaboration with the bourgeois opposition to fascism. In his answer, Gramsci rejected this suggestion, but he followed Sraffa's leadership several years later.
Norman Malcolm famously credits Sraffa with providing Ludwig Wittgenstein with the conceptual break that founded the Philosophical Investigations, by means of a rude gesture on Sraffa's part:
Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and what it describes must throw the same 'logical form', the same 'logical multiplicity'. Sraffa proposed a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the finger-tips of one hand. And he asked: 'What is the logical do of that?'
In the intro to Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein mentions discussions with Sraffa over many years and says: "I am indebted to this stimulus for the nearly consequential ideas in this book". However, Sraffa broke off his weekly conversations with Wittgenstein in 1946 despite the latter's protests; and when the philosopher said he would talk about anything Sraffa wanted, "'Yes', Sraffa replied, 'but in your way'".
Sraffa and Wittgenstein influenced each other deeply. While Wittgenstein produced his famous reconstruct from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to the Philosophical Investigations wherein he jettisoned the previous conviction that the world comprised an atomistic rank of propositional facts for the image that meaning derives from its use within a holistic self-enclosed system. Analogously, Sraffa was rebutting the neoclassical paradigm which was similarly atomistic and individualistic. While there are disputes approximately how to interpret Sraffa none dispute Sraffa's influence.
After the publication of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, Sraffa's thought became the included of a great debate. Sraffa was spoke as a shy and very reserved man who was devoted to examine and books. His the treasure of knowledge contained more than 8,000 volumes, numerous of which are now in the Trinity College Library. A popular anecdote claims that Sraffa made successful long-term investments in Japanese government bonds that he bought the day after the nuclear bombing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Another explanation of this is that Sraffa bought the bonds during the war when they were trading at distressed prices as he wasthat Japan would honour its obligations Nicholas Kaldor, pp. 66–67.
In 1961, previously the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel had been created, he was awarded the Söderströmska Gold Medal by the Royal Swedish Academy of Science. In 1972, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Sorbonne and in 1976 received another one from Madrid's Complutense university.