Sraffa's and Wittgenstein's Crossed Influences: Forms of Life and Snapshots

The purpose of this contribution is to investigate Sraffa’s and Wittgenstein’s mutual methodological and philosophical influences to try to point out how they reveal the possibility of an interpretation of Sraffa’s contribution to economics which differs from the most usual ones. The second part of this paper will consider how it is possible to read Production of Commodities by means of Commodities (PCMC) as an attempt to build a classical version of the theory of General Economic Equilibrium. Its third part will focus on the interpretation of Sraffa’s 1960 scheme in terms of “long-period positions”. In a fourth part, we will investigate the notions of “form of life” and “language game” in Wittgenstein post-Tractatus contributions, beginning to connect them to some developments included in Sraffa’s Unpublished Manuscripts. Finally, in the last part of this paper, we will show how these notions offer some similarities with an interpretation of Sraffa’s contribution in terms of morphological and comparative analysis of the economic foundations of surplus-based societies.