Krishna Bharadwaj’s Legacy: The Apologia for an Objective Basis of Analysis in Economics

This article revisits the main tenets of Bharadwaj’s intellectual legacy, exploring her critique of methodological individualism, and her insistence on the distinction between objective and subjective magnitudes in the explanation of economic phenomena and her closeness to Sraffa, in defending the classical political economy approach against the theories based on the method of marginal analysis. I will summarize the main points of her critique of mainstream economic theory, stressing the distinctive differences in the methodological frameworks and theoretical approaches characteristic of the two broad streams in theories of value and distribution — one, the classical, the surplus-based, theories, and the other, the demand-and-supply-based equilibrium theories.