Sraffa, il metodo "marginale" e il cambiamento

Sraffa's well known rejection of the notion of marginal utility, and most of all of marginal product, is often thought to rest on a methodological preconception on his part: on an argument, that is, that had nothing to do with his interest and his knowledge of economic reality on the one hand, and of the history of economic thought on the other. Through a perusal of Sraffa's unpublished notes on the subject we argue that there was nothing dogmatic (or strictly 'philosophical', to use A. Sen's phrase) about his rejection . Above all, we find that criticising the 'marginal' method was in fact only one side of Sraffa's rediscovery of a method, such as that pursued by the classical economists, better suited for the understanding of the complexity and the variability of economic phenomena.