WALRAS, Léon.

£4,250 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Recherche de l'idéal social: First full edition, presentation copy, with a cropped ownership inscription by the Swiss lawyer Joseph Hornung (b. 1822), recording that he received the copy from the author in February 1870. Joseph Hornung (b. 1822) was a Swiss lawyer and academic, contemporary with Walras at the University of Geneva. He promoted humanitarianism, most notably in his 1885 article Civilisés et barbares, which remains a significant citation in humanitarian literature.Walras's series of lectures were written for the members of La Caisse d'escompte des associations populaires de crédit, de production et de consommation (the Cooperative Credit Union), the administration of which Walras joined in 1865. Dealing with workers' cooperatives and capitalism, they originally appeared individually in the journal La Travaille between October 1867 and March 1868. "In these lectures, Walras insisted that his first goal was to encourage workers to accumulate capital through saving and that one of the most important solutions to pauperism was to help these workers become capitalists. The Union workers were forced to save more money, which was deducted regularly from their wages. This was made possible, allegedly, thanks to the decrease in purchase prices by buying on a large scale, which allowed Union workers to buy everyday commodities at lower cost and therefore save more money" (Misaki, p. 13).The inscription reads "J. Hornung [] Don de l'aut[or] Fev. 1870".

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