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  1. 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

  2. COMTE, Auguste.

    Systeme de politique positive ou Traite de sociologie, instituant le religion de l’humanite.

    Paris, L. Mathias, 1851-4.

    First edition. ‘Comte’s sociology was overly intertwined with his conception of the right polity. In Comte’s view, society had broken down with the French Revolution. The Revolution had been necessary because the old order, based on outdated “theological” – Catholic – knowledge, no longer...

    £1175

  3. COUSIN, Victor.

    Elements of psychology, included in a critical examination of Locke’s Essay on the human understanding ... translated...

    Hartford, CT, Cooke and Company, 1834.

    First edition in English, and first American edition, translated from the French with an introduction, notes and additions by the Transcendentalist C.S. Henry. This is the first work in English with ‘psychology’ in the title. Cousin’s stress on the importance of method in philosophy led him to...

    £250

  4. DEL GIUDICE, Odoardo.

    Psychologiae eclecticae elementa ad usum studiosae juventutis.

    Perugia, Constantiniana, 1793.

    First edition, very rare: OCLC records a single copy, and a few of the second edition, published in altered circumstances in 1825. A Franciscan, Del Giudice writes a compendium on the theory of the human mind for students. His account tackles contemporary philosophies, such as materialism, in ample footnotes,...

    £295

  5. FECHNER, Gustav Theodor.

    In Sachen der Psychophysik.

    Leipzig, Breitkopf und Hartel, 1877.

    First edition. ‘Fechner for the first time clearly states the problem of a scientific psychology: how can the subjective realm be made the object of an exact and experimental science? … Fechner’s answer is, only by [psychology] becoming psychophysics’ (A. Kim, in The Routledge companion to...

    £295

  6. GILBRETH, Frank B.

    Motion Study. A method for increasing the efficiency of the workman.

    New York, D. Van Nostrand Company, 1911.

    First edition, rare, of this pioneering work in scientific management. The field of ‘motion study’ was developed by engineer Frank B. Gilbreth and his wife, psychologist Lillian M. Gilbreth, in order to increase the efficiency of work processes through methods that promoted the welfare of the worker...

    £550

  7. KÜLPE, Oswald.

    Grundriss der Psychologie. Auf experimenteller Grundlage dargestellt.

    Leipzig, Wilhelm Engelmann, 1893.

    First edition of this important work in the development of experimental psychology. Külpe’s Outlines of Psychology was published at the suggestion of his mentor Wilhelm Wundt, to whom the work is dedicated. However, it reflects Külpe’s divergence from Wundt’s views on the scope of their discipline....

    £350

  8. LAWRENCE, William Beach.

    Two lectures on political economy delivered at Clinton Hall, before the Mercantile Library Association...

    New York, G. & C & H. Carvill, 1832.

    First edition, uncommon. The author, an American jurist and politician, was the son of Isaac Lawrence, President of the New York Branch of the Bank of the United States and a Presidential Elector. In his Lectures Lawrence deplored speculation as the mechanism which gives rise to boom-and-bust cycles,...

    £450

  9. LE PLAY, Frédéric.

    Les ouvriers européens. Tome premier [-6me].

    Tours, Alfred Mame et Fils, 1879.

    Second, greatly enlarged edition. This groundbreaking, comprehensive work of sociology, which examines the working condition, domestic life and psychological aspects of European workers, had appeared in its first form in 1855 a single volume. ‘Since public opinion was not yet ready to accept his conclusions,...

    £750

  10. MACKENZIE, George.

    The moral history of frugality with its opposite vices, covetousness, niggardliness and prodigality, luxury.

    London, Hindmarsh, 1691.

    First edition, rare; an Edinburgh edition followed in the same year. Mackenzie settled in Oxford before dying in 1691, and this posthumous work opens with his paean to the University and the Bodleian. It concludes with Thomas Glegg’s Latin epitaph.

    £250

  11. MALTHUS, Thomas Robert.

    An essay on the principle of population; or, a view of its past and present effects on human happiness;...

    London, Murray, 1817.

    Fifth edition, ‘with important additions’. This is a significant edition, containing the new chapters that had appeared in the Additions of the same year. These included those on the Poor Laws, which were revised after 1815, and the harsh but prescient critique of Robert Owen’s utopian community...

    £650

  12. MILL, James.

    Analysis of the phenomena of the human mind.

    London, Baldwin and Cradock, 1829.

    First edition of Mill’s work of empiricist philosophy, largely an exercise in logical thought rather than a careful study of psychology. Mill describes the body’s interconnected system of sensual receptors through which the mind forms complex ideas, which in turn inform the passions and the will....

    £800

  13. PATTEN, Simon Nelson.

    The principles of political economy; being a reexamination of certain fundamental principles of economic science.

    Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1885.

    First edition. Patten was one of a group of ‘new school’ American economists who had gained their doctorates in Germany, and subscribed to the German Historical School by rejecting classical Ricardian and Malthusian theories of rent, wages and population. Here Patten addresses each of these subjects...

    £200

  14. PIGOU, Arthur Cecil.

    Industrial fluctuations.

    New York, Macmillan, 1927.

    First edition. This work was ‘hived off’ from the larger and monumental Wealth and welfare (1912), the work that had been in hand when Pigou succeeded Alfred Marshall as Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge in 1908: ‘to the end of his life he remained steeped in the Marshallian system. What...

    £200

  15. [PRATT, Samuel].

    The regulating silver coin [sic], made practicable and easie, to the government and subject. Humbly submitted...

    London, Bonwick, 1696.

    First and only edition. William Lowndes had the Treasury pay for this argument for the recoinage of the currency of 1696, and it was supportive of his policy of devaluation. Pratt calls for regulation of the mint and an end to clipping, hoarding and the exportation of coins. He develops the idea of a...

    £600

  16. ROETHLISBERGER, Fritz Jules and William J.

    DICKSON. Management and the worker.

    Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1939.

    First edition, the famous ‘Hawthorne study’ of Roethlisberger and Elton Mayo (who provides a preface), carried out on willing employees of the Western Electric Company’s Hawthorne branch, this book being dedicated to those employees. The researchers tested numerous short-term variables such as...

    £200

  17. SIMMEL, Georg.

    Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung.

    Leipzig, Duncker & Humblot, 1908.

    First edition, an uncommonly appealing copy. Simmel ‘had laid the foundations for the discipline of sociology long before Max Weber [who has essentially eclipsed him in the history of the discipline] turned to the problem of sociology as a special subject … The aim of sociology was to describe the...

    £200

  18. SMITH, Samuel Stanhope.

    An essay on the causes of the variety of complexion and figure in the human species. To which are added,...

    New-Brunswick, Simpson, and New York, Williams and Whiting, 1810.

    ‘Second edition, enlarged and improved’, really the third and enlarged American edition, first printed in Philadelphia in 1787. Smith was very much still alive and involved; in the preface he acknowledges his debt to the anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, whose works he was unaware of when...

    £225

  19. TARDE, Gabriel.

    Psychologie Économique.

    Paris, Alcan, 1902.

    First edition, scarce. Tarde believed in the necessity of social harmony for viable economic activity, arguing that economic growth and innovation, like any form of social progress, is dependent on leisure, since it is leisure that encourages interactions between individuals and the formation of a social...

    £250

  20. VEBLEN, Thorstein.

    The higher learning in America. A memorandum on the conduct of universities by business men.

    New York, B. W. Huebsch, 1918.

    First edition. Veblen’s project for the ideal university, and consequent criticism of American universities for being something different. He describes the dominance of American universities by business interests, making academic communities subservient to concerns of accountancy and conformity, all...

    £150