HUME, David - KEYNES, John Maynard, & Piero Sraffa (eds).

£500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

An Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature, 1740. First edition of the work which established Hume's authorship of the Abstract. This volume, the only work Keynes and Sraffa wrote together, include their philological study and a facsimile reprint of the Abstract itself. Hume published the Abstract in March 1740, roughly a year after the first two volumes of his Treatise of Human Nature. The Treatise had received limited and primarily critical reviews: the Abstract serves to explain and promote it, focussing primarily on its cause-and-effect argument. Both works were published anonymously, while a 1740 letter from Hume refers to a "Mr Smith" possessing a copy of the Abstract. These two facts allowed enthusiastic 19th-century biographers to venture that the Abstract was written by the 16-year-old Adam Smith, then studying at the University of Glasgow. By citing numerous pieces of internal and external evidence, Keynes and Sraffa roundly disprove such suggestions.

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