Sergio Cesaratto
DEPS, USiena
Abstract
Students of ancient societies critical of New Institutional Economics (NIE) seem ineffective or intimidated in expressing a full alternative to its current hegemony. Yet a conceptual ghost continues to haunt many works in this field: that of economic surplus. The notion of social surplus is indeed distinctive of the classical economists’ approach, continued by Marx, and more recently revived by Piero Sraffa and Pierangelo Garegnani, after having been ‘submerged and forgotten’ by the Marginalist revolution of the late Ninetieth century. This paper builds upon the familiarity that students of precapitalist societies have with the concept of surplus to delineate a robust economic alternative to NIE. After a brief presentation of the surplus approach, the paper examines some motives of unsatisfaction with NIE and with some more recent mainstream studies of the onset of inequality we label ‘marginalist materialism’. The criticism Karl Polanyi has moved to the surplus approach is then constructively reconsidered. The paper underlines the bidirectionality of the interest in communication between economic history studies and surplus theory.
Keywords
Surplus Approach, Marginalism, New Institutional Economics, Samuel Bowles, Sraffa, Marginism
Jel Codes
A12, B51, B52, N01, Z13
