STOREP is pleased to announce that the 2025 STOREP grant of 2,000€ for innovative small-scale research projects is awarded to
Sergio Cesaratto (Università di Siena)
“On the applicability of modern economic analysis to the ancient economies: a comparison of alternative approaches”
KEYWORDS Surplus approach, Institutions, Economic History, Polanyi, ancient economies
JEL Classification Codes: A12, B15, B51, B52, Z13
Project outline
In the pars destruens of their work Piero Sraffa, Pierangelo Garegnani, and Luigi Pasinetti undermined the analytical foundations of marginalist price and distribution theories while, in the pars construens, they recovered the surplus approach proper to classical economists and Marx. This paper assesses the comparative usefulness of, respectively, the marginalist and the modern surplus approaches for the interpretation of pre-capitalistic economies and for the theory of institutions, also in the light of Polanyi’s contribution.
In the last five years the candidate has published several papers on the economic analysis of pre-capitalist societies (see the list below). In these works, alternative approaches have been compared: the classical surplus approach, marginalism and its New Institutional Economics branch (NIE), Karl Polanyi’s tradition. In the light of the widespread utilization of the concept of social surplus in antiquity studies and of the shortcomings of the competing theories, the former has resulted as the most promising. During these years various contacts have been established with scholars of ancient economies by participating to conferences and seminars. A recent initiative is a book, L’economia prima dei Greci. Un manuale introduttivo (Carocci), edited by a young Egyptologist (dr. Alessandro Piccolo) with the participation of young and senior scholars from La Sapienza in Rome, among which the world-known archaeologist Marcella Frangipane. Other senior economists, members of Storep, have been invited to the initiative. The main theme of the book will be income inequality in ancient societies and, in a subordinate position, economic growth (a theme on which NIE insist a lot). While the other economists will present the modern theories of income distribution and labour markets, my own research has the most challenging task of assessing the applicability of these alternative approaches to ancient economies.
My research will begin from a review the mentioned three approaches to precapitalist economic formations: the classical surplus approach, marginalism (including New Institutional Economics), and the Polanyian school. It will next focus over some mainstream contributions under the profiles of the appropriateness of the marginalist tools and of their rejection of surplus theory. While mainly concerned with recent contributions, it will start from a classic contribution by Evsey Domar (1970), who anticipated the strategy of the more recent papers of picking up a hypothesis from the students of ancient economies, revisiting it by marginalist tools. These recent mainstream studies include: Bogaard, Fochesato, and Bowles (2019) revisiting the role of the adoption of ox-drawn plough in the early insurgence of inequality; Mayshar, Moav, and Pascali (2022) doing the same re-examining the role of cereals storage, and Allen, Bertazzini, and Heldring (2023) regarding the time-honoured hydraulic hypothesis. The thesis I would like to discuss is that, while the reference by these works to material hypothesis is appreciable, their confinement within a marginalist scheme is inappropriate; I would also like to demonstrate that their rejection of the surplus approach is poorly motivated.
Summing up, I shall begin from a critical review of some alternative approaches to pre-capitalist societies including marginalism (comprising NIE), the Polanyian tradition (substantialism) and the classical surplus approach. I will particularly examine some recent mainstream contributions concerning the origin of inequality and related institutions. These studies adopt materialist explanations of the origin of inequality and institutions drawn from archaeological studies, quite often from scholars that use the concept of social surplus. Yet these contributions openly reject the classical surplus approach. The material hypotheses they study are interesting. Paradoxically. however, these studies resort to marginalism to explain the onset of inequality, a theory that was born to deny exploitation, not to explain it.
Mario Cedrini