Principes de la Théorie des Richesses.

COURNOT (Augustin).

Principes de la Théorie des Richesses.

First edition. 8vo. [4], iv, 527, [1, blank] pp. Contemporary quarter red roan with marbled paper covered boards, flat spine panelled with gilt rules, second panel lettered in gilt, marbled endpapers, sprinkled edges (recent neat pencilled ownership inscription of Hon. Stanley C. Wisniewski to the half title, neat marginal highlighting to the opening chapter, faint creasing to upper corners of pp. 37-40, some occasional spotting, mostly concentrated to outer leaves; extremities rubbed, spine only slightly faded with some minor scuffing, notwithstanding a very good copy overall). Paris, Librairie de L. Hachette et Cie, 1863.

£1,500.00

Cournot was the first ‘to visualize the general interdependence of all economic quantities and the necessity of representing this cosmos by a system of equations’ (Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis). In 1838 he published Recherches sur les Principes Mathématiques de la Théorie des Richesses. Perhaps because he was primarily a mathematician and his work contained technicalities to which economists had been previously unaccustomed, Cournot’s book was totally ignored when it first appeared until its significance was later recognised by Marshall, Walras, and Jevons. Cournot was so discouraged by its reception that he gave up economics for 25 years, before returning to the subject with the present work in which he attempted restate his theory without the mathematics and develops it into a systematic doctrine. Because in the Recherches he ‘treated only questions where mathematical analysis was applicable … the product was not a complete treatise on political economy but a selection of contributions to various specific topics’ (Theocharis, Early Developments in Mathematical Economics, p. 200). In the Principes the results are united.

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254217

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