Sundry Observations and New Findings on the Anglo-Italian Tradition of Economic Thought

The opening in 1993 of the Sraffa Collection and of the Sraffa Papers at Trinity College, Cambridge, has enabled the author to conduct a thorough research on some aspects of the Anglo-Italian School of Economics. The present paper provides some of the results of my digging into the origins of the Anglo-Italian connection together with an attempt to disentangle what is living and what is dead in the legacy of the School today. Both outcomes of the treatment are largely set out on the basis of archival researches. The whole is focussed mainly on the notion of Classicism in economics, one of the core issues of the Anglo-Italian School. In particular, Luigi Pasinetti’s fundamental contributions to dynamic theory in Economics mark the passage from a Ricardian stage of economic Classicism to a stage of enriched Smithian Classicism. The latter has its roots both in the direct influence from the legacy of Sraffa and also in an apparently more remote influence, i.e. in the close association, established during the Enlightenment, between the Scottish and the Italian tradition of civil and economic studies. The sources of Pasinetti’s economic thought, thus, stretch well beyond the post-war Cambridge School of Economics. The paper establishes solid connections between that new territory and the Anglo-Italian tradition.