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Human Sciences

Contact Jonathan Harrison, Alfred Pasternack or Barbara Scalvini

Human Sciences at Quaritch embraces a wide range of books and manuscripts documenting the history of ideas from the earliest times up to about 1960. Our strengths are in the history of economic thought and in philosophy, but we also deal in law; finance and banking (including speculation, actuarial science and insurance); politics and political theory; sociology; psychology; agriculture; education; logic; and the theory of language.

Some notable items which have recently passed through our hands include the only known copy of the Communist Manifesto inscribed by Karl Marx, Rudolf Carnap’s annotated copy of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung), Joseph Penso de la Vega’s Confusion de Confusiones (1688, the first book to describe the practice of a stock-exchange) and a copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (4th edition, 1786), inscribed in Smith's own hand to Bonnie Prince Charlie's private secretary.

As well as dealing in individual books and manuscripts, we also offer collections. In recent years we have sold author collections of Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, Thorstein Veblen, Emile Durkheim and Jeremy Bentham. Among subject collections we have offered are the Herwood Library of accounting literature (including Pacioli's Summa de Arithmetica, 1494, the first printed exposition of double-entry book-keeping); the philosophy of language; texts pertaining to the theory and study of language in the West, and the history of probability - the calculus of probabilities, statistics and their applications.

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  1. LEWIS, Wyndham.

    Left Wings Over Europe: or, how to make a War about Nothing.

    London, Jonathan Cape, [1936].

    First edition, first printing, a reiteration of the delusions about Hitler that Lewis had first presented in Hitler (1931), alongside a rejection of the Internationalism he had argued so firmly for in The Art of Being Ruled and would later espouse once more. Lewis afterwards dismissed the...

    £500

  2. LEWIS, Wyndham.

    The Jews, are they human?

    London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, [1939]

    First edition, Lewis’s first avowedly antifascist text, an argument against antisemitism written after the first draft of The Hitler Cult but published nine months earlier. Lewis had visited Germany, and the Warsaw Ghetto, in 1938, and had been left disturbed. ‘Perhaps because he had come...

    £450

  3. LEWIS, Wyndham.

    America and Cosmic Man.

    London and Brussels, Nicholas and Watson Ltd., [1948].

    First edition, second state binding as always (the first, in green cloth, was rejected by Lewis as ‘hideous’ and was used on only 3 trial copies). In hand by 1943, not finished until 1946 and then rejected by American publishers until it finally found a British home in 1948, America and Cosmic Man...

    £200

  4. LEWIS, Wyndham.

    Rude Assignment. A Narrative of my Career up-to-date … Illustrated with works by the Author.

    London, Hutchinson & Co., [1950].

    First edition, first impression, ‘one of the most readable of his later works ... also one of the most illuminating’ (Bridson, Filibuster).

    £275

  5. LEWIS, Wyndham.

    The Lion and the Fox. The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare …

    London, Methuen & Co. Ltd., [1955.]

    Reprint of the second edition of Lewis’s ‘first political book’, a collection of essays engaging with Shakespeare and Machiavelli first published in 1927 and then reissued by Methuen in 1951; inscribed in a very shaky hand ‘To Geoffrey Bridson from Wyndham / Oct 1956’.

    £300

  6. LIEBER, Francis.

    Autograph letter in French, signed ‘François Lieber’, to Joseph Bonaparte, comte de Survilliers, Napoleon’s...

    Columbia, South Carolina, 9 May 1836.

    The German-American political scientist Francis Lieber (1800–1872) was a prolific theorist of political ethics and jurisprudence. He emigrated to Boston in 1827, where he impressed John Quincy Adams, and became Tocqueville’s principal informant for Democracy in America (1835–40). In 1835 he was...

    £425

  7. LIEBIG, Justus von.

    Autograph letter, signed, to an unnamed English nobleman.

    Munich, 10 December 1857.

    A fine letter from Justus von Liebig to an unnamed English nobleman.

    £1250

  8. LOCKE, John.

    Johan Lockes oförgripelige tankar om werldslig regerings rätta ursprung/gräntsor och ändamål.

    Stockholm, Kongl. Tryckeriet, 1726.

    First edition in Swedish. The first translation into Swedish of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, this edition – of the Second treatise – was translated, by order of the Swedish Ricksdag, by Hans Harmens from Mazel’s 1691 French edition. It was only the second time that any of Locke’s work...

    £300

  9. LUBLER, Johannes. 

    Tractatus de incendio antehac nunquam editus in quo omnia ac singula ad hanc materiam pertinentia dilucide...

    Liège, Lambert Thonon, 1701. 

    Rare second edition of this legal study of fire and its consequences, the only known work of the German jurist Johannes Lubler. 

    £450

  10. MAGNA CARTA.

    Magna Charta: or, the Great Charter of King John; to which are added, the Declaration of the Estates of the Kingdom...

    Glasgow: Printed by E. Miller. Sold by James Duncan, Junr. James Steel, and Walter Duncan, Booksellers. [c. 1810]

    First edition thus, rare. COPAC and OCLC show Glasgow only.

    £75

  11. MALTHUS, Thomas Robert.

    Principles of political economy considered with a view to their practical application.

    London, Murray, 1820.

    First edition. The Principles were developed through controversy with Ricardo, especially with regard to the theory of value, but the origins of the essay are in the Essay, which constituted Malthus’s earliest writings on prices, income and savings. The difference that emerges between...

    £1400

  12. MARCHESINI, Marcello.

    Saggio d’economia politica, o sia Riflessioni sullo spirito della legislazione relativamente all’agricoltura,...

    Napoli, Vincenzo Orsino, 1793.

    Very rare first and only edition of a book on economic and social policy by Marcello Marchesini, a scholar from Istria who, having been trained in Venice, took the chair of Political Economy in Naples after Genovesi. Marchesini declares in the title that his book should be regarded as a ‘Spirit of...

    £700

  13. MARSHALL, Alfred.

    Official papers.

    London, Macmillan for the Royal Economic Society, 1926.

    First collected edition of all the written memoranda and oral evidence Marshall prepared on economic questions for government departments and official enquiries, with the exception of his work on the Labour Commission. The collection was edited by Keynes, who provides a preface: ‘generally speaking,...

    £150

  14. MARX, Karl.

    W kwestii Żydowskiej.

    Warsaw, [“Monografia”] for Instytut Wydawniczy “Renaissance”, 1938.

    First edition to be printed in Poland, the second in Polish (first, London, 1896) of Marx’s controversial article Zur Judenfrage ('On the Jewish Question'), which appeared first in 1844 in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.

    £280

  15. [MASCHERANA, Girolamo.]

    Concordia tra la società e la religione ossia Difesa del culto cattolico contro chi lo calunnia in contrasto...

    Milan, Cesare Orena nella stamperia Malatesta, 1798.

    Rare second edition, printed in the same year as the equally rare first, of this curious defence of religion in the light of the constitution of the Cisalpine Republic, in which the author seeks to demonstrate the compatibility of Catholicism with the Enlightenment ideals of the French Revolution and...

    £375

  16. [MEIN, Robert.] 

    A Nominal Encomium on the Election of Magistrates at Michaelmass 1764. 

    [Edinburgh, 1764.] 

    First edition, very rare, a poem celebrating both the election of James Stuart of Binend as Lord Provost of Edinburgh, and the plans for the construction of Edinburgh New Town, of which building was to commence in 1767.  Typically for Mein he anagrammatizes his subject as ‘A Just Master’,...

    £450

  17. MENDELSSOHN, Moses.

    Jerusalem oder über religiöse Macht und Judenthum.

    Frankfurt and Leipzig, n. p., 1787.

    First posthumous edition, originally published in 1783 by Friedrich Maurer in Berlin, of this later work by Mendelssohn (1729–1786), in which he supports religious and political toleration, and advocates separation of church and state and civil equality for Jews. The work was reprinted as recently as 2001.

    £200

  18. MILL, John Stuart.

    The Subjection of Women.

    London: Longmans, Green, 1869.

    First edition of ‘the last of [Mill’s] great political tracts’ (ODNB), one of the most important and controversial treatments of women’s rights in the nineteenth century. Mill was heavily involved in the women’s suffragette movement, and in this work he argued ‘that the principle which...

    £3400

  19. MILL, John Stuart.

    A szabadságról ... Angolból forditotta és az elöszót irta Kállay Béni.

    Pest, Kiadja Ráth Mór, 1867.

    First Hungarian edition of John Stuart Mill’s great essay On Liberty, with a lengthy introduction by the Austro-Hungarian statesman Béni Kállay (1839–1903). First published in 1859, Mill’s vastly influential essay was dedicated to his wife Harriet who had provided the stimulus for...

    £450

  20. [MONASTICISM].

    Risposta ad alcuni aggravi fatti ai monaci nel libro, che ha il titolo di Politica, diritto, e religione.

    Milan, Francesco Agnelli, 1742.

    Only edition of this anonymous response to Giuseppe Gorini Corio’s controversial Politica, diritto, e religione, that had appeared in Milan at the start of the same year.

    £400