Essays on the Formation and Publication of Opinions, and on Other Subjects.
London: Printed for R. Hunter... 1821. First edition. Bailey’s first book which was considered by well-informed radicals of the 1820s to be "the most useful single addition to the moral sciences since the Wealth of Nations" (William H. Wickwar, The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press, 1819-1832, London, 1928, p. 246). The Essays on the Formation and Publication of Opinion were praised by James Mill in the Westminster Review for July 1826 and later by the American Thomas Cooper in the preface of his own Treatise on the Law of Libel and the Liberty of the Press (1830). A few rust stains and spots in blank margins, but a fine, crisp copy. Original boards, uncut, neatly rebacked. Octavo. xi, [1], 284 pp. Item #15417
Bailey [1791-1870] was an independent and slightly isolated thinker, who, though generally admiring of Thomas Brown, was a keen utilitarian critic of Scottish common sense. Politically he was a philosophical radical; indeed, he was occasionally described as the 'Hallamshire Bentham,' while in theology he was a devotee of the American theologian Jonathan Edwards" (Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Philosophers). Bailey also occupies an important place in the history of economic analysis through his Critical Dissertation on the Nature, Measures and Causes of Value… (1823). This work on Ricardo, rediscovered by Seligman in 1905, was judged by Schumpeter (1954) to be a “masterpiece of criticism" and to lie near the “front rank in the history of scientific economics."
Not in Kress, Goldsmiths or Mattioli. The second edition, (1826) is Einaudi 246.
Price: $1,250.00