“THE OLD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION MUST GIVE WAY TO THE NEW”: FIRST EDITION OF INDUSTRY AND POLITICS, SIGNED BY SIR ALFRED MOND

MOND, Alfred. Industry and Politics. London: Macmillan, 1927. Octavo, original blue cloth, original dust jacket.

First edition of the famous industrialist’s speeches and philosophy on the revolutionary economic and political changes of his time. Signed by Sir Alfred Mond.

The son of a leading industrialist, Alfred Moritz Mond would eventually reshape his father’s company into I.C.I., a major global corporation, and in the process play a key role in altering the direction of 20th-century global politics. “It was in his capacity of active manager of a great manufacturing corporation that Mond made a deep mark on the industrial history of his time as an earnest exponent of the need for organization and research, later as a successful champion of the process of rationalization and amalgamation, and finally as a strenuous advocate of close co-operation between employers and employed… Contemptuous of the doctrine of laisser-faire and of all that it implied, he was convinced that the planning of great enterprises, to be carried out by big industrial battalions, was the only line of future development… Mond was equally emphatic on the need for the abolition of the lock-out and strike as methods of settling disputes between capital and labour… Whatever may be the ultimate verdict on Mond's industrial and financial ideals, there can be no question that his work for conciliation between capital and labour… successfully promoted the harmony and goodwill which are essential to prosperous industry” (DNB). Mond also entered Parliament in 1906, and one of the notable points of his tenure remains his 1924 speech on the differences between capitalism and socialism, included here, with other papers and talks that “address was considered an outstanding defense of private enterprise.” In 1928 Mond “initiated a conference between leaders of commerce and industry on the one hand, and workers… on the other. Out of this conference emerged the Mond-Turner agreement for industrial relations. In the same year he was raised to the peerage, as Baron Melchett” (Encyclopedia Judaica, 242). Sir Alfred Mond also achieved a degree of literary fame at the hands of writers such as Aldous Huxley and T.S. Eliot. Huxley satirized Mond in Brave New World’s Mustapha Mond, and in T.S. Eliot’s poem “A Cooking Egg,” the industrialist appears in the lines “I shall not want Capital in Heaven / For I shall meet Sir Alfred Mond / We too shall lie together lapt / In a five per cent Exchequer Bond.”

Lightest edge-wear to extremities of near-fine book, some soiling and edge-wear, with two small closed tears to seams of very good dust jacket. Scarce signed.