Profits, Interest and Investment, a jacketed first edition noteworthy for both condition and provenance.
and other Essays on the Theory of Industrial Fluctuations
London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd., 1939. First edition, first printing. Hardcover. This is a lovely, jacketed first edition, compelling for both condition and provenance. Profits, Interest and Investment was published the year after Hayek became a naturalized British citizen and just months before the outbreak of the Second World War.
Condition is near fine in a near fine dust jacket. The dark red cloth binding is square, clean, bright, and tight with vivid spine gilt, sharp corners, and virtually no wear. We note only a touch of mottling to the lower front cover, a tiny indentation to the front cover fore edge, and wrinkling to the spine ends. The contents retain a crisp feel, with light spotting primarily confined to the prelims and page edges. The dust jacket is entirely complete, with no loss and the original “6s. net” price intact on the lower front flap. The jacket spine is only lightly toned and soiled, the jacket’s extremities showing light shelf wear. The dust jacket is protected beneath a clear, removable, archival cover.
This copy is noteworthy not only for exceptional condition, but for provenance. The signature on the title page (the only previous owner mark) features the surname “Wakatsuki” and a date of “Oct 1939”. This is plausibly the signature of Baron Wakatsuki Reijir (1866-1949), twice prime Minister of Japan (from 1926 to 1927 and again in 1931). Also noteworthy is the illustrated sticker of the “SUBUN SO BOOK STORE” affixed to the upper front flap of the dust jacket. Tokyo’s venerable Subun-So was founded in 1841, before Tokyo became Japan’s capital, and appears to be still operating today.
Authorial attribution – “Friedrich A. von Hayek” – is also of note. The “von” was a marker of Hayek’s descent from minor Austrian nobility. Such titles were abolished in the inter-war Austrian republic and “the ‘von’ got back into his name only by an accident, when he submitted his birth certificate for British naturalization just a year before this volume was published. Hayek “was in too much of a hurry for a passport to correct it.” Hayek later dropped use of ‘von’ only to have it pejoratively reapplied; playing on anti-Germanic sentiment, “Hayek's English-language opponents insisted on calling him in later life von Hayek.”
Profits, Interest and Investment is a collection of eight essays, these “a selection from the various attempts made in the course of the past ten years to improve and develop the outline of a theory of industrial fluctuations contained in… Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle and Prices and Production.” The first, titular, and longest essay is presented by Hayek as “a revised version of the central argument” of Prices and Production, “but treated from a different angle and on somewhat different assumptions. The others… deal with different special aspects of the same problem.”
Vienna-born British economist Friedrich August Hayek (1899-1992), winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, was known for his criticisms of the Keynesian welfare state and of totalitarian socialism. Following degrees from the University of Vienna, a research assistantship in New York, work at the Austrian Institute for Economic Research, and a lectureship at the University of Vienna, in the late 1920s some of Hayek’s papers caught the attention of a professor at the London School of Economics (LSE) – one of the few who could read German. In 1931 Hayek was invited to give a series of lectures in London. The result was twofold: Hayek’s lectures were published later that year as Prices and Production and the 32-year old Hayek was offered an a professorship at LSE, where he remained until 1950.
Hayek became part of the effort “to establish the LSE as a centre for economic theory; to counteract the insular emphasis of Cambridge; and to combat the influence of John Maynard Keynes”. Hayek later regarded his work at the LSE in the 1930s as “intellectually [the] most active and satisfying of my life”. Four decades before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, “Hayek was mainly known in the 1930s for technical studies of monetary, business cycle, and capital theory.”
References: ODNB; Hayek on Hayek; Mises Institute. Item #008900
Price: $5,000.00