[Rarebooks] fa: ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE - DE LA DEMOCRATIE EN AMERIQUE 1837-40

[ArCh]

Auction ending Sunday, October 23. No reserve. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

https://tinyurl.com/mr33vxca

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA


Alexis de Tocqueville: De la Democratie en Amerique... Orne d'une carte d'Amerique. Quatrieme edition. Bruxelles: Societe Belge de Librairie, 1837. Three volumes. [WITH:] De la Democratie en Amerique. Deuxieme Partie. Bruxelles: Societe Belge de Librairie, 1840. Three volumes bound in one. Together, four volumes, 12mo (15.5 cm), in early (original?) cloth-backed marbled boards; with half-title pages to all the volumes, folding hand-colored map.

The fourth edition of part one, first published in Paris in 1835, and the first Brussels edition of part two, published the same year as the first French edition. Bindings with some wear to the edges and extremities, light rubbing, sunning to the spines; contents with occasional light foxing, most noticeable on the preliminary and terminal leaves, a few small scattered spots, half-titles with the neat early owner's stamp of M. Tydeman, else clean and sound, firmly bound.

A very good example of an early printing of this classic of political and social science. "In 1831 Tocqueville journeyed to the United States...to study the American penal system. He then wrote Democracy in America, the first volume of which appeared in 1835, the second in 1840... Tocqueville was interested in the political, cultural, and to a lesser extent, economic consequences of 'democracy', by which he meant, not representative government or political arrangements of any sort, but 'equality of conditions'... Tocqueville's major intellectual, not to say political, preoccupation was discovering how 'liberty' might be preserved under democratic conditions" (New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics). Sabin 96060 and 96061; Goldsmiths 28903 (ed. Paris, 1835-1840).