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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BEAUMONT, Gustave-Auguste de la Bonninière de.
Autograph letter signed (‘Gustave de Beaumont’) to Sarah Austin.
Birmingham, 27 June [1835].
A warm and personal autograph documenting the relationship between Beaumont (1802–1866), prison reformer and travel companion to Alexis de Tocqueville, and one of the most accomplished contemporary catalysts of philosophical exchange, the translator Sarah Austin.
£350
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BEBEL, August, and Daniel DE LEON, translator.
Woman under socialism. Translated from the original German of the...
New York, Labor News Press, 1904.
First edition in English, first printing, of Bebel’s Die Frau und der Sozialismus (1884), the initial cause of a bitter rift between its translator, Daniel de Leon, and James Connolly of the Socialist Labor Party, who thought it would scare off female recruits.
£125
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[BECCARIA, Cesare.]
Dei Delitti e delle pene. Edizione sesta di nuovo corretta ed accresciuta.
Harlem, et se vend a Paris, chez Molini, 1766.
Sixth edition, expanded to forty-seven paragraphs, of Beccaria’s principal work, one of the founding texts of penology and an important statement of criminal law reform, here with the additions of the ‘Giudizio di celebre professore sopra il livro dei delitti e delle pene’ and ‘Risposta...
£750
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[BENDISCIOLI, Faustino.]
Quadro ossia saggio epilogato del Sistema di liberta’ proclamato dai Francesi.
Milan, Stamperia [dei Patrioti d’Italia] di Strada Nuova, [1799].
An impassioned tract attacking the claims of a new life of liberty promoted in Europe after the French Revolution, very rarely to be found in any of the three editions published in the same year.
£200
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BENTHAM, Jeremy.
Plan of Parliamentary Reform, in the Form of a Catechism, with Reasons for each Article. With an Introduction,...
London: Printed in the Year 1817. Re-printed and Re-published, with Notes and Alterations, by Permission of the Author, by T. J. Wooler … 1818.
First edition thus of an inexpensive reprint of Bentham’s Plan of Parliamentary Reform (1817), the style adapted by Thomas Wooler, with Bentham’s permission, to ‘render it more easy of comprehension to the popular reader’. In this form it first appeared in instalments in Wooler’s radical...
£225
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BEVERIDGE, William Henry.
Full employment in a free society: a report ...
London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, [1944].
First edition of the second report by the social reformer and economist W. H. Beveridge (1879-1963), a sequel to the epoch-making Beveridge report on Social Insurance and Allied Services made to the Government in December 1942. Beveridge had earlier published Unemployment: a Problem of Industry (1909),...
£50
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[BOLINGBROKE, Henry St John, Viscount].
Letters, on the Spirit of Patriotism: on the Idea of a Patriot King: and on the State of...
London: Printed for A. Millar … 1749.
First authorised edition. Written in 1738 for the Prince of Wales, the manuscript was then entrusted to Pope who had it printed, to Bolingbroke’s fury: he bought up the entire edition and had it burnt in October 1744 (only two imperfect copies survive, at the British Library and Princeton). He later...
£375
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BONAPARTE, Jerôme-Napoléon.
Letter signed as governor of Les Invalides to the members of the Conseil d’administration de la...
Paris, Hôtel des Invalides, 16 February 1849.
Jérôme-Napoléon Bonaparte (1784–1860) was the youngest brother of Napoleon I and reigned as Jerome Napoleon I, King of Westphalia, between 1807 and 1813. He became governor of Les Invalides when his nephew Prince Louis Napoleon became president of the second French Republic in 1848.
£300
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BOSWELL, James.
A Letter to the People of Scotland, on the alarming Attempt to infringe the Articles of Union, and introduce a...
London, Printed for Charles Dilly … 1785.
First edition of Boswell’s second Letter to the People of Scotland, written to oppose a bill in Parliament for reducing the number of the Lords of Session from fifteen to ten.
£1500
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[BOUTREUX D’ESTIAU, Jacques de.]
De la puissance roialle sur la police de l’Eglise.
Paris, Pierre Durand, 1625.
A pair of uncommon works defending the French king’s authority over the Church, in a binding for Jacques-Auguste II de Thou and later in the renowned Caumartin library.
£950
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[BRISTOL.]
The Bristol Contest, being a Collection of all the Papers published by both Parties, on the Election, 1754.
Bristol, ‘sold by the Printing-Office … and by J. Palmer’, [1754].
Extremely rare first edition of this Bristol-printed political pamphlet, bound with the first edition of a French work on pyrotechnics used both for spectacle and for war.
£650
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BROOKLYN ETHICAL ASSOCIATION.
[Cover title: Evolution]. Man and the State. Studies in applied sociology. Popular lectures...
[N.p., n.d., n.d.].
First edition of this broadly political collection of essays on economics, race relations, the Democratic and Republican parties, and suffrage, inter alia, likely from the library of a Californian senator.
£150
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BUONACCORSI, Biagio, and Niccolò VALORI.
Diario de’ successi piu importanti seguiti in Italia, & particolarmente in...
Florence, Filippo & Jacopo Giunta, 1568.
First edition of an insider account of Medici politics by Biagio Buonaccorsi (1472–1522), colleague and confidant of Machiavelli, bound with the first edition of Malespini’s history of Florence and owned by Claude-Enoch Virey, secretary to Henri II de Bourbon, Prince de Condé.
£1000
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BUXTON, Thomas Fowell.
An Inquiry, whether Crime and Misery are produced or prevented, by our present System of Prison Discipline...
London, [J. M’Creery] for John & Arthur Arch, J. Butterworth & Son, and John Hatchard, 1818.
Third edition, published the same year as the first, of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton’s influential Inquiry into the British prison system.
£195
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CAIROL, M. de.
Réflexions historiques et politiques, sur les revolutions qu’a essuyé l’agriculture sous différens gouvernemens,...
Amsterdam and Toulouse, Joseph Robert, 1786.
Very rare essay on the state of agriculture in France, and in particular in the Languedoc, examining the ways in which the policies of various governments (from the Romans and Visigoths onwards) have affected agricultural production, the current situation, and the ways in which matters could be...
£450
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CALVERT, William John.
The demand for labour is wealth … Supplement to monopoly and taxation vindicated against the errors of...
Newark, M. Hage and London, Longman … 1822.
Very rare first edition of Calvert’s supplement to his own work, Monopoly and taxation vindicated etc., published in 1821. Calvert wrote anonymously in the name of ‘a Nottinghamshire farmer’, but here uses his name. The supplement argues that Britain’s wealth and military success against France...
£250
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[CARDUCCI, Giosuè, Olindo GUERRINI, et al., editors.]
...
Bologna, 19 April [– 29 June] 1874.
Very rare complete run of this short-lived satirical magazine against the pro-government newspaper Il Monitore, produced by a group of young liberals from Bologna including the poets Giosuè Carducci and Olindo Guerrini.
£1000
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[CAVALLERI, Paolo Agostino.]
Lettera dall’Adriatico del signor Antonio Bianchi sopra l’opera de’diritti dell’uomo del sig....
Rome, Giovanni Zempel, 1792 (colophon 1793).
First edition, uncommon, of this counter-revolutionary polemic written in response to Spedalieri’s I diritti dell’uomo of the previous year and attributed to the Barnabite Paolo Agostino Cavalleri (1742-1803). Spedalieri had attempted a Catholic response to the revolutionary ideas of the rights of...
£375
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[CERI, Giovacchino Domenico.]
Prodromo all’estirpazione del pirronismo dalla ragion civile d’Italia.
[Florence?] 1769.
Only edition, uncommon, of this analysis of the political and legal organisation of Italy, and proposals for its improvement, by the Prato lawyer and historian Giovacchino Domenico Ceri (1734–1798).
£375
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[CHARLES II.]
RIVET, Jean. ‘Le favory du Ciel ou Meditation sur le pseaume cent un par Jean Rivet laisné Sainctongeois’.
[Caussade en Quercy, 1664.]
A fascinating manuscript meditation on Psalm 101, a text traditionally used as an exposition on princely authority in Protestant theology, with a long dedication ‘A Tres Puissant et Serenissime Roy Charle deuxiesme Roy de la grande Bretagne’.
£1850