Search results
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COMTE, Auguste.
Lettres d’Auguste Comte a M. Valat.
Paris, Dunod, éditeur, successeur de Dalmont, Juillet 1870.
First edition thus, Comte’s letters written to Philippe Valat, a disciple of whom little seems to be known. He was a professor of mathematics at Montpellier and rector of a church at Rhodez. The letters, all of them from Comte to Valat, are sometimes highbrow but mostly show Comte simply discussing...
£125
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COMTE, Auguste.
CONGREVE, Richard, editor and S. LOBB, translator. The eight circulars of Auguste Comte. Translated...
London, Trübner & Co., 1882.
First edition, the first appearance in English. Comte’s ‘circulars’ are fundraising essays, addressed to the patrons who subscribed to positivist funds. Congreve was a founder of the London Positivist Society in 1867, and promoted a specifically religious interpretation of the positivist philosophy,...
£150
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COMTE, Auguste.
DESCOURS, Paul and H. Gordon JONES, translators. The fundamental principles of the positive philosophy....
London, Watts, 1905.
First edition thus, rare in commerce. The introduction is by Edward Spencer Beesly, an English positivist who was acquainted with Marx. In 1893 he founded the Positivist Review. He describes this as the first instalment in a more complete translation of Comte’s Philosophie Positive than...
£80
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COMTE, Auguste.
HARRISON, Frederic, editor. The new calendar of great men. Biographies of the 558 worthies of all ages and...
London and New York, Macmillan, 1892.
First edition of a positivist collection of biographies drawn from Comte’s thirteen-month calendar of eminent men in history. This is not one for feminists; though in leap-years, an additional day is generously provided for ‘good women’ (and another for ‘all the dead’). Harrison was tutored...
£175
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[COMTE, Auguste.]
LEWES, George Henry. Comte’s philosophy of the sciences: being an exposition of the Cours de philosophie positive...
London, Bohn, 1853.
First edition. Lewes brings Comte’s philosophy to a new audience in England, where Comte’s reputation is on the rise, and updates the scientific context to include all the ‘very latest facts and ideas’. Lewes had no formal scientific training but from around 1853 onwards he took an active interest...
£175
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[COMTE, Auguste.]
CAIRD, Edward. The social philosophy and religion of Comte.
New York, Macmillan, 1885.
First American edition, first published Glasgow in the same year, originally appearing as a series of articles in the Contemporary Review. Caird is critical of the Positivist religion, calling it ‘artificial’ and focusing on its current schisms. Comte himself gets off lightly, with Caird willing...
£60
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[COMTE, Auguste.]
LÉVY-BRUHL, Lucien. BEAUMONT-KLEIN, Kathleen de, translator. The philosophy of Auguste Comte. Authorised...
New York and London, Putnam’s and Sonnenschein, 1903.
First American edition, the London edition appearing the same year; first published in French in 1900. An attempt to reinforce the idea of the absolute reality of ‘humanity’ in a system otherwise entirely relative, towards which doubts were obviously growing. Lévy-Bruhl ponders mathematics, science...
£50
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[COMTE, Auguste.]
LITTRÉ, Émile. Auguste Comte et la philosophie positive.
Paris, Hachette, 1863.
First edition. Littré, better-known as a philologer and compiler of French dictionaries, was a devoted positivist. This edition contains Comte’s correspondence with John Stuart Mill but also with Harriet Martineau, translator of the Cours de philosophie positive; an account of Comte’s influences;...
£75
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COOLEY, Charles Horton.
Human nature and the social order.
New York, Scribner’s, 1902.
First edition. Cooley’s first published book on the subject of sociology, following a number of articles written in the 1890s. In this work Cooley lays out his conception of the individual self as being defined by its relationships with society, with a strong focus on the development of children. This...
£125
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COOLEY, Charles Horton.
Social organization. A study of the larger mind.
New York, Scribner’s, 1909.
First edition. This work continues from Human nature by further developing the idea of a self-conscious self, more reliant in this instance on the basic tenets of psychoanalysis, such as the Ego. Much more prevalent here is the consideration of economic systems, with free will under discussion...
£150
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COOLEY, Charles Horton.
Social process.
New York, Scribner’s, 1918.
First edition of Cooley’s last major work of theoretical sociology. If Social organization was a book about free will and the potential or predilection for upward movement in economic systems, such as in the ‘ascendant’ capitalist class, the most significant idea presented by Cooley in Social...
£150
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DURAND DE GROS, Joseph-Pierre.
Essais de physiologie philosophique suivis d’une étude sur la théorie de la méthode en general.
Paris, London, New York and Madrid, Baillère, 1866.
First edition of Durand’s early work of behavioral psychology. His essays on the physiology of perception and the relationship of the mind to the outside world do not, by his own admission, use groundbreaking medical observations, but he readdresses well-versed scientific knowledge with philosophical...
£100
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DURKHEIM, Émile.
“L’Allemagne au-dessus de tout”. La mentalité allemande et la guerre. [Études et documents sur la guerre].
Paris, Colin, 1915.
First edition. Durkheim’s essay, written as the First World War was underway, detects a ‘morbid character’ at the heart of the idea ‘Deutschland über alles’. The essay considers the place and power of the State above morality, in the context of international law.
£55
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DURKHEIM, Émile and Ernest DENIS.
Qui a voulu la guerre? Les origines de la guerre d’après les documents diplomatiques.
Paris, Colin, 1915.
First edition. An attempt to read the ‘facts’ behind the origins of the First World War by studying diplomatic documents. France and England are exonerated, as us Russia to some extent; basically, Austria gets the blame.
£45
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DURKHEIM, Émile and Ernest DENIS.
WILSON-GARINEI, A. M., translator. Who wanted war? The origin of the war according to...
Paris, Colin, 1915.
First edition in English of the above. The translator, of whom nothing is known, is described as ‘late student of Newnham College Cambridge, Modern Languages Tripos’; an interesting case of a graduate, jobbing, female translator in wartime.
£35
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DURKHEIM, Émile.
Le socialisme. Sa définition, ses débuts, la doctrine saint-simonienne.
Paris, Alcan, 1928.
First edition of Durkheim’s historical study of socialism, its relationship to communism and utopian ideas and its ‘debuts’ in positivism and Saint-Simon’s Système industriel, which is the primary focus of the study.
£100
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ELY, Richard Theodore.
An introduction to political economy.
New York, Chautauqua Press, 1889.
First edition; there is also an issue with a variant brown cloth binding. A nice general introduction from a sociological perspective, in that the first part is broadly concerned with sociological theories of economics, including stage-based theory and social functions; the second part deals with more...
£60
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FLINT, Robert.
Socialism.
London and Philadelphia, Isbister and Lippincott, 1895.
First edition. Flint’s rather conservative view of socialism is largely an unsympathetic one, and he even brands the Collectivists of the earlier part of the nineteenth century as ludicrous, though they were the progenitors of Marx’s idea that the worker owned the produce of his labor; an idea, Flint...
£100
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GUMPLOWICZ, Ludwig.
MOORE, Frederick W., translator. The outlines of sociology.
Philadelphia, American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1899.
First edition in English of Gumplowicz’ Grundriss der Soziologie (1885). Gumplowicz was chiefly interested in jurisprudence, and its relation to the ethnology and nationhood of ‘mixed’ societies, where two or more racial groups have come together. Continuing here from his earlier Rassenkampf...
£100
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GUMPLOWICZ, Ludwig.
Geschichte der Staatstheorien.
Innsbruck, Wagner’schen Universitäts-Buchhandlung, 1905.
First edition, the last of Gumplowicz’s works to be published in his lifetime. He committed suicide with his wife in 1909, terminally ill with cancer. The Geschichte is a compendium of brief studies on the chief figures of ‘state-theory’, philosophy and sociology; the chief movements of the latter;...
£150