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[USURY] -- Jeremy BENTHAM (1748-1832). Defence of Usury; Shewing the Impolicy of the Present Legal Restraints on the Terms of Pecuniary Bargains...[with] a Letter to Adam Smith...on the Discouragements opposed by the above Restraints to the Progress of Inventive Industry. London: T. Payne and son, 1787.
8° (156 x 96mm). Contemporary half-calf, spine gilt, red morocco label (a little rubbing to joints and corners). Provenance: The 1st Earl Camden, Lord Chancellor (1714-1794; armorial bookplate).
FIRST EDITION. Bentham's best-known work on economics, written (in the form of letters to his friend George Wilson) at Crichoff in White Russia, is a polemic against the laws fixing a maximum rate of interest. In another letter to Wilson, Bentham famously wrote: 'You know it is an old maxim of mine, that interest, as love and religion, and so many other pretty things, should be free.' (Letter, Dec. 1786, in T.R. Christie (ed.) Correspondance of Jeremy Bentham, London: 1971, vol.III, p.518.) The book is notable among other things for its treatment of anti-semitism. (2)
8° (156 x 96mm). Contemporary half-calf, spine gilt, red morocco label (a little rubbing to joints and corners). Provenance: The 1st Earl Camden, Lord Chancellor (1714-1794; armorial bookplate).
FIRST EDITION. Bentham's best-known work on economics, written (in the form of letters to his friend George Wilson) at Crichoff in White Russia, is a polemic against the laws fixing a maximum rate of interest. In another letter to Wilson, Bentham famously wrote: 'You know it is an old maxim of mine, that interest, as love and religion, and so many other pretty things, should be free.' (Letter, Dec. 1786, in T.R. Christie (ed.) Correspondance of Jeremy Bentham, London: 1971, vol.III, p.518.) The book is notable among other things for its treatment of anti-semitism. (2)