“Piero Sraffa: economic reality, the economist and economic theory. An interpretation”.

We carry out a textual analysis of Sraffa's main published contributions to pure economics in order to elaborate a rational reconstruction of an aspect of Sraffa's implicit methodology which has not yet been duly investigated. We refer to the threefold relationship between ‘economic reality’, ‘the economist/observer’ and ‘economic theory’. We elucidate the constraints which, for Sraffa, should bind the economists' arbitrariness and we trace the elements of continuity and evolution from the 1925–6 critique of Marshallian economics to Production of Commodities.