Font Size: 

Piero Sraffa (1898-1983) was one of the sharpest minds of the 20^th century. Ludwig Wittgenstein credited him for ‘the most consequential ideas’ of the Philosophical Investigations and put him high on his short list of geniuses. Sraffa’s revolutionary contribution to Economics was however lost to the world because economists did not pay attention to the philosophical underpinnings of his economics. Based on my archival research, I present a new thesis that shows that Sraffa was introducing a revolutionary methodological transformation in economic theorizing by removing causation (both essential and mechanical causations) from its foundation and establishing it on a non-causal descriptive or geometrical foundation based on simultaneous relations instead. The methodology for this approach he introduced is holistic instead of atomistic, as is the case with the orthodox economics. A consequence of this approach was a complete removal of ‘agents subjectivities’ or demand and ‘marginal method’ or counterfactual reasoning from economic analysis —the two fundamental pillars of the orthodox economic theory.