When great minds do not think alike: Pasinetti and Samuelson on Ricardo

Taking advantage of the recent opening of the Samuelson Archive and the Pasinetti Archive, we scrutinise a hitherto unpublished correspondence between Pasinetti and Samuelson concerning their almost contemporaneous mathematical treatments of Ricardo’s economics: Samuelson (Citation1959) and Pasinetti (Citation1960). We focus on three inter-related issues: the labour theory of value, Ricardo’s attempt to “get rid of rent,” and the role of final demand. We assess the respective arguments by Samuelson and Pasinetti both in their published and unpublished contributions, and we highlight their radically different perspectives on value and distribution theory.