“A RADICAL CRITIQUE OF… ECONOMIC THEORY”: FIRST ENGLISH EDITION OF MARX’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, 1904
MARX, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. New York / London: International Library / Kegan Paul, Trench Trübner, 1904. Octavo, original red cloth gilt.
First English edition of Marx’s seminal early work that laid the foundation for Das Kapital, preceded the same year by the New York first edition in English, in original gilt-lettered cloth.
“The first fruits of Marx’s long-continued economic studies appeared in his Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie (1859),” first published in English with this posthumous 1904 edition (Palgrave II:704). In this important early work Marx proposed “a radical critique of the emerging discipline of economic theory” (Prychitko). “It was the first part of a much larger work planned to cover the whole ground of political economy”—a project realized in 1867 with Das Kapital (Encyclopaedia Brittanica). Marx’s Critique laid the the foundation for a “system that embraced all the social sciences… There is consistency in all aspects of Marxism that goes far beyond Adam Smith’s efforts at comprehensive political economy” (Blaug, 215). With “Second Revised Edition” on title page: preceded the same year by the first edition in English (issued in New York, also by International Library). Translated from the second German edition by Nahum I. Stone. With appendix containing Marx’s Introduction to the Critique, issued in German in Neue Zeit (1903) and “found among his posthumous papers” (265).
Text fine, small expert repair to blank rear free endpaper; minor edge-wear, faint soiling to cloth. A scarce near-fine copy.