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75 HICKS, John R. Value and Capital. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939 His most significant book, in jacket First edition, first impression, of the author’s most significant book, very scarce in the dust jacket. Though obscure to the public eye – an “economist’s economist” ( OED ) – Hicks introduced many concepts that are still significant in economic theory. Value and Capital “taught a whole generation of economists to employ indifference curves and general equilibrium theory” (Blaug, p. 91ff). Octavo. Original blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt. With dust jacket. With 25 diagrams. Ownership signature to front free endpaper dated 1939. A near-fine copy in the discreetly restored jacket, with some Japanese tissue repairs to verso. ¶ Mark Blaug, Great Economists since Keynes , Edward Elgar, 1988. £2,750 [134623] 76 HOBBES, Thomas. Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiastical and Civill. London: for Andrew Crooke, at the Green Dragon in St. Paul’s Church-yard, 1651 one of the foundational works of political theory True first edition of one of the foundation works in the field of political theory, with the winged head ornament on the title page. Leviathan details Hobbes’s notion of the origin of the State as a product of human reason meeting human need, through to its destruction as a consequence of human passions. According to Hobbes, the State, as an aggregate of individual men (so well portrayed in the famous engraved title), should
always be tendered the obedience of the individual, as any government, in his view, is better than the natural anarchic state, where the life of man is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short” (p. 62). Needless to say, this view elicited a storm of controversy, putting Hobbes at odds with proponents of individual liberties. Through conflict, Leviathan has been the catalyst of much productive thought in succeeding centuries, from Spinoza to the school of Bentham, “who reinstated [Hobbes] in his position as the most original political philosopher of his time” ( PMM ). Leviathan “produced a fermentation in English thought not surpassed until the advent of Darwinism” (ibid). There are three editions with title pages bearing 1651 imprints. The second, with a bear ornament, was printed
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WEALTH AND WELFARE
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