[DUPONT DE NEMOURS (Pierre Samuel).]
Examen du livre de M. Malthus sur le Principe de Population; auquel on a joint la Traduction de quatre Chapitres de ce Livre supprimés dans l'Edition française; et une lettre à M. Say sur son Traité d'Economie politique.
THE RARE FINAL WORK BY THE LAST PHYSIOCRAT ECONOMIST
The rare first edition of the final work by the Physiocrat economist Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours (1739-1817), published in America, where he died earlier in the same year.
The work is hugely significant as the only published theoretical engagement with the works of Malthus by a proponent of the Physiocrat school, since all of the major followers of Quesnay had passed away by the time of publication. It stands as a remarkable commentary on the development of the classical school of political economy in Britain and France since the great ferment of economic thought in France half a century earlier, in which Du Pont himself had been a key figure.
It includes a translation of the final four chapters of Malthus’s Essay on Population, which had been omitted from the original French translation, and a letter to Jean-Baptiste Say, whose Traite d’économie politique du Pont had read aboard the ship Fingal in 1814.
Einaudi, 1666; Kress, 21762.1.
