The Marxist Tradition in the History of Economics

Abstract

There is a significant Marxist tradition in the study of the history of economics. Marx himself wrote extensively on his predecessors, albeit mainly in works that remained unpublished at his death. His approach has had a substantial impact in the field, particularly from the midtwentieth century onward, although it may be fading now. It was, after all, Marx who introduced the name classical to describe Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and others, a usage that has become universal, and his interpretation has had a lasting influence on debates over the identification and characterization of classical economics. The orthodox Marxist interpretation of classical economics focuses, as Marx did, on the labor theory of value and the notion of surplusvalue.1After discussing Marx’s own writings (and the rather special case of Marxist writings on Marx as a historical figure), I shall take Ronald Meek’s work, and in particular his Studies in the Labour Theory of Value ([1956] 1973)2 as exemplifying this approach. The publication in 1960 of Piero Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities launched an alternative approach, less obviously connected to Marx. Sraffa’s book itself is a work of pure theory, but it led, as Sraffa must have intended, to a new reading of Marx and of the classical economists,