The strength of classical or Sraffian political economy in Italy, as elaborated by Pierangelo Garegnani among many others, is certainly an important cause of the fact that neoclassical economic theory never achieved the hegemonic status in Italy that it did in the United States.
It may also be one of the reasons why the Marxian critique of political economy—as against Marxian approaches to philosophy, political theory, culture, and so on—has never been particularly strong in Italy.
Robert Vienneau has a brief discussion of Garegnani’s major contributions, along with a selected bibliography in English.
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a sad day for his pupils…
Thanks for remembering him
Garegnani’s work was an exemplar of serious, rigorous theory and criticism. He took no guff from the often arrogant defenders of market theory, and he kept the critical message coming loud and clear over a long career. I studied his 1970 (I think) demolition of the production function in my first serious upper-level grad course in Economics — before I had the chance to give serious study to Marx. It was and is a magnificent polemical argument; I still quote him to students of the History of Thought:
“The idea that demand and supply for factors of production determine distribution has become so deeply ingrained in economic thought that it is almost viewed as an immediate reflection of facts and not as the result of an elaborate theory. … In order to explain distribution, we must rely on forces other than ‘supply’ and ‘demand’.”
Garegnani helped me a grad student find my way towards studying Marx and broader heterodox thinking. A toast to his legacy.
I wrote this in memorium for professor garegnani on the daily kos; published in the anti-capitalist chat there: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/20/1028331/-In-Memorium:-Pierangelo-Garegnani-?showAll=yes&via=blog_661138
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