Between Berlin and Cambridge: classical conceptions of the general economic equilibrium in the late 1920s

This paper deals with some contributions to the debate on General Economic Equilibrium between the two world wars. Originating in Cambridge and Berlin, they differed from the Viennese contributions of the Walrasian perspective traditionally considered by the literature. They can be defined to represent the classical approach to general equilibrium. The authors considered are the Italian-born economist Piero Sraffa, the German mathematician Robert Remak and the Russian-born economist Wassily Leontief. The paper focuses in particular on the intellectual origins of their contributions in the Russian-German theoretical debate of the period 1890–1910 involving classical economists, Marx and Walras: these connections emerge clearly in the contributions of the German-Russian Mathematical School between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.