Rare books, manuscripts and ephemera from five centuries

Monarchy better than despotism 

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HERTZBERG, Ewald Friedrich von. DISSERTATIONS qui ont été lues dans l’assemblée publique de l’Académie des Sciences et des Belles-Lettres à Berlin les années 1784, 1785, & 1786. pour le jour anniversaire du Roi … A Bassan: Chez Remondini, MDCCLXXXVII [1787]. £700

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FIRST EDITION. 8vo (217 × 145 mm), pp. [4], 132; printed on thick paper, with generous margins; faint water-stain to outer corner of final few leaves; contemporary (presumably original) block-printed wrappers, spine darkened, a few chips; early ink ownership inscription (‘Carlo Giuseppe ??’) partly effaced. 

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A lovely copy, pleasingly bound in its original decorative printed wrappers, of this set of three essays on political economy and philosophy presented to the Berlin Academy of Sciences each year from 1784 on the occasion of the birthday of Frederick the Great by the Prussian statesman and diplomat Ewald Friedrich von Hertzerg (1725-1795).

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The three essays deal in turn with the question of what the optimum form of government is, with the population of states in general and Prussia in particular, and the wealth of nations, and the balance of commerce and power. To this reader, the first is the most interesting, with Hertzberg drawing heavily on Montesquieu’s reduction of governance to one of three types: monarchic, despotic, and republican. It may come as little surprise that Hertzberg, in celebrating the birthday of a monarch, might conclude that of these three, monarchy is the most conducive to the flourishing of the state and its people, but he does at least attempt to support this with evidence of the amounts of money spent by Frederick’s government on improving the state of the country. 

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Goldsmiths’ 13314 (bound with another work by Hertzberg); not in Kress; outwith continental Europe, OCLC records physical copies at Alberta, University of London, Academia Sinica in Taipei, and Cambridge. 

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[ref: 2532 ]