From Walras to Sraffa: Claudio Napoleoni’s Account of General Economic Equilibrium

The analysis of the theory of general economic equilibrium allowed Claudio Napoleoni to highlight the subordination of consumption to production and the progressive restriction of political economy’s domain of enquiry as its analytical tools became more rigorous as main trends in the history of economic thought from Walras to Sraffa, to the point that, in the latter, the entire productive configuration was assumed to be already determined, leaving the system of equations describing the existence of a surplus as ‘socially mute’ with respect to its origin. Political economy thus ended up precluding for itself the analysis of its most essential question, and yet at the same time offered a faithful mirror of the capitalist inversion between subject and object, of the subordination of human needs to the logic of accumulation. Focusing on Napoleoni’s writings in the 1960s, the paper will critically discuss this reconstruction, also taking into account Napoleoni’s attempt in the 1970s to look for new premises for economic theory, as well as the reason for his return, in the 1980s, to positions already held during the 1960s.