Personal Connections
As stated above, Sraffa is known also for his close friendship with Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci and for being instrumental in securing Gramsci's Prison Notebooks from the Fascist authorities after the latter's death in 1937. Norman Malcolm famously credits Sraffa with providing Ludwig Wittgenstein with the conceptual break that founded the Philosophical Investigations, by means of a rude gesture on Sraffa's part:
Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same 'logical form', the same 'logical multiplicity'. Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the finger-tips of one hand. And he asked: 'What is the logical form of that?'
In the introduction to Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein mentions discussions with Sraffa over many years and says: "I am indebted to this stimulus for the most consequential ideas in this book".
Sraffa was described as a very intelligent man, with a proverbial shyness and a real devotion for study and books. His famous library contained more than 8,000 volumes, now partly in the Trinity College Library. A popular anecdote claims that Sraffa made successful long-term investments in Japanese government bonds that he bought the day after the nuclear bombing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Another version of this is that Sraffa bought the bonds during the War, when they were trading at distressed prices, as he was convinced that Japan would honour its obligations (Nicholas Kaldor pages 66–67).
In 1972, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Sorbonne, and in 1976 he received another one from Madrid's Complutense university.
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