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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. CARAVADOSSI, Enrico.

    La moderna filosofia convinta d’inganno nelle sue promesse di felicità libertà ed uguaglianza ragionamenti...

    Turin, Giammichele Brioio, 1793.

    First and seemingly only edition of this attack on the false promises of the philosophes, by the Torinese Dominican friar Enrico Caravadossi.

    £395

  2. CARNAP, Rudolf.

    1959 & 1962.

    The first photograph shows Carnap and his wife outside their house and is signed and, in another hand, dated 1959 as having been taken in Santa Monica. The second photograph is of Carnap and is dated 1960, signed and inscribed “Der lieben Erna, in alter Freundschaft”. This refers to Erna Lowenberg...

    £1500

  3. CARON, Jean-Charles-Félix.

    Compendium institutionum philosophiae, in quo de rhetorica et philosophia, tractatur. Ad usum candidatorum...

    Paris, N. M. Tilliard, 1770.

    Very uncommon guide, by the Parisian surgeon Jean-Charles-Félix Caron, to the philosophy student in the University of Paris needs to know in order to graduate first as bachelor and then as master of arts in the university. The work is essentially a kind of bluffer’s guide: “there are people who,...

    £875

  4. [CATHERINE II, Empress of Russia].

    Le Czarewitz Chlore. Conte Moral. De main impériale & de maitresse.

    Berlin, Fréderic Nicolaï, Lausanne, François Grasset, 1782.

    First edition, very rare, of a speculum principis of the Enlightenment, by one of the time’s most enlightened monarchs. Le Czarewitz Chlore is a moral tale written by Catherine II of Russia for her two grandsons, the future Alexander I and his younger brother Constantine, while their father and mother,...

    £3000

  5. [CAVALLERI, Paolo Agostino].

    Lettera dall’Adriatico del signor Antonio Bianchi sopra l’opera del sig. Abate D. Nicola Spedalieri.

    Rome, Giovanni Zempel, 1792.

    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...

    £485

  6. CHRYSOSTOM, John. 

    [Opera: Homeliae.]  Que in secundo Ioannis Chrisostomi volumine continentur: Super Mattheum homelie 89 …...

    Venice, Stagnino & de Gregoriis, 1503. 

    First edition of Chrysostom’s Opera omnia, the second volume (of two), annotated throughout by two critical readers. 

    £2800

  7. COMTE, Auguste.

    Cours de philosophie positive.

    Paris, Bachelier, 1830-1842.

    First edition, an attractive set, of Comte’s principal work, the outline of positivism. In the course of six volumes Comte sets out the terms of a new sociology and its status in relations to the other fields of knowledge. In fact it is in the forty-seventh lesson that the neologism ‘sociologie’...

    £1600

  8. COMTE, Auguste, and Albert CROMPTON (editor).

    Confessions and Testament of August Comte: and his correspondence with...

    Liverpool, Young, 1910.

    First edition in English of Comte’s Confessions, which first appeared with his ‘testament’ in French in 1884. These take the form of ‘Twelve Saint Clotildes’, a series of annual confessions which he recited to his muse’s grave. Clotilde de Vaux was a divorced woman whom Comte met...

    £80

  9. CORTÈS, Gioacchino. 

    Dissertazione anti-Bolgeniana sopra la carità difesa dal suo autore l’abate Gioacchino Cortes contro...

    Rome, Salomoni, 1793. 

    First edition of this response to and attempted refutation of Bolgeni’s Della carità o amor di Dio by the Spanish Jesuit Joachim Cortès.  Della carità was the best-known work of the Jesuit theologian and controversialist Gianvincenzo Bolgeni, in which he had argued, against...

    £450

  10. [COYER; VOLTAIRE; WAR OF THE AUSTRIAN SUCCESSION.]

    ‘Recueil des Pieces’.

    France, 1744-1749.

    An extraordinary sammelband of 75 pamphlets – 27 of which are recorded in only 3 or fewer libraries on OCLC – mostly relating to successful French exploits throughout Europe during the War of the Austrian Succession, including the Dutch and Italian campaigns and the conclusion of the war.

    £5500

  11. [DEATH OF REASON].

    Oracion funebre dicha en las Exêquias del Ente de Razon.

    Barc[elona], Pedro Gomita. c.1787.

    Barcelona printing, in the same year as the first, of this speech given in competition at the Provincial Chapter of the Franciscans in Malaga, offering a funereal eulogy for Reason.

    £215

  12. DESCARTES, René, and Louis de la FORGE (editor).

    Tractatus de homine, et de formatione foetus.

    Amsterdam, Daniel Elzevir, 1677.

    First and only Elzevir edition, and the first edition of the better Latin text of Descartes’s Traité de l’homme. De homine ‘is the first work in the history of science and medicine to construct a unified system of human physiology that presents man as a purely material and...

    £1100

  13. DESLANDES, André-François Boureau.

    Dying Merrily: or, historical and critical Reflexions on the Conduct of great Men in all Ages,...

    London: Printed for M. Cooper ... 1745.

    First edition of this translation of Réfléxions sur les grands hommes que sont morts en plaisantant (1712), by the philosopher and naval official André-François Deslandes (1670–1757), an important precursor of the Encyclopédistes.

    £450

  14. DIOGENES LAERTIUS, [and Henri ESTIENNE (editor)].

    Περι βίων, δογμάτων και αποφθεγμων...

    [Geneva,] Henri Estienne, 1570.

    First Estienne edition of The Lives of the Philosophers, a very important edition in the original Greek, ‘in which appear for the first time many passages discovered in manuscripts by Estienne’. ‘The volume also contains thirty-six pages of important textual annotations by Henri Estienne,...

    £1400

  15. [DODSLEY, Robert, et al.] 

    The Oeconomy of Human Life, in two parts, translated from an Indian manuscript, written by a...

    Newport, J. Mallett, 1783. 

    Rare printing, undertaken in Newport on the Isle of Wight by James Mallett.  Only nine publications are listed in ESTC as Mallett, Newport: mostly occasional endeavours, undertaken in 1767, 1770, 1782, 1783 (two publications, including ours), 1784 and 1789 (three publications), and almost all...

    £450

  16. DOLCE, Lodovico.

    Somma della filosofia a’Aristotele, e prima della dialettica. [with:] Somma di tutta la natural filosofia di...

    Venice, Giovanni Battista, & Marchio Sessa, & fratelli, [1565].

    First edition of this exposition of Aristotle’s dialaectics, moral, and natural philosophy by ‘one of the major transmitters of culture in cinquecento Italy’ (Ronnie H. Terpening, Lodovico Dolce: Renaissance Man of Letters, 1997).

    £5500

  17. DU RONDEL, Jacques. 

    La vie d’Épicure. 

    Paris, Antoine Cellier, 1679. 

    First edition of Du Rondel’s Life of Epicurus, a seminal work in the study of eighteenth-century Epicureanism; an important copy, from the distinguished library of Pierre-Daniel Huet. 

    £1750

  18. EPICTETUS.

    To tou Epiktetou encheiridion. Ex editione Joannis Upton accurate expressum.

    Glasgow, Foulis, 1751.

    The first miniature Foulis edition of Epictetus in Greek, and the first Foulis Epictetus in Greek only; it had been preceded by a larger format, duodecimo (1748) edition in Greek and Latin. A 1765 reissue was, according to ESTC, reset.

    £900

  19. ERASMUS, Desiderius. 

    Paraclesis, id est adhortio ad sanctissimum ac saluberrimum Cristianae philosophiae studium … 

    Basel, Johann Froben, February 1520. 

    Attractive contemporary Erasmus sammelband, superbly eloquent in its physical union of three treatises without which the humanist’s Praise of Folly would risk gross misinterpretation. 

    £5500

  20. FLORENT DE SALES (pseud.).

    Vrai systême du monde physique et moral.

    [Switzerland,] 1797.

    Only edition, rare, of this utopia, the identity of whose author, and even of whose printer, remains unknown.

    £2500