[Rarebooks] fa: WILLIAM GODWIN - ENQUIRY CONCERNING POLITICAL JUSTICE 1798

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, May 15. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

http://tinyurl.com/j635f58

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI


 William Godwin: Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on Morals and Happiness. The third edition corrected. In two volumes. London: Printed for G. G. and J. Robinson, 1798. Two volumes, 8vo (21.5 cm), in nineteenth-century textured calf with modern spine labels, marbled endpapers and page edges; [iii]-lvi, 463, [1] pp.; [iii]-ix, [1], 554 pp. ESTC N6482. PMM 234; Goldsmiths Library 15825; Kress B2529 (for the first edition).

Sunning to the spines and edges, front board of vol. I with scuffing and abrasions, joints professionally repaired/reinforced; bound without the half-titles, if called for; owner's signature of J. Manford Kerr on the title-pages; contents toned, intermittent light to moderate foxing throughout; penciled marks, underlinings and marginalia (occasionally rather extensive and contentious) by an early owner; else generally clean and sound, firmly bound.

The third, finalized edition of the magnum opus of William Godwin (1756-1836), one of the great intellectual boogiemen of his age, radical freethinker, atheist, anarchist, economist, philosopher, novelist, essayist, biographer, proponent of free-love, husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley. A philosophical bombshell when it was first published in 1793, Political Justice is considered a foundational work of socialist, Marxist and anarchist theory. "It is difficult for us today to appreciate the horror with which, on its appearance, Godwin's Political Justice was viewed by the respectable classes" (Alexander Gray, The Socialist Tradition).