The Foundation Work of Protectionist Trade

List, Friedrich. Das nationale System der politischen Oekonomie. Erster Band [all published]: Der internationale Handel, die Handelspolitik und der deutsche Zollverein.

Tübingen, J. G. Cotta'scher Verlag, 1841.

8vo. LXVIII, (2 pp. table of contents, verso also numbered LXVIII), 589, (1) pp., including 2 title pages. Contemporary half cloth over marbled boards with giltstamped spine title.

 8,500.00

First edition.

Friedrich List's seminal advocacy of economic nationalism, derived from the nationalist and romantic ideas of Alexander Hamilton and Adam Müller, from whom List also adopted his opposition against the ideas of Adam Smith. List considered the principle of free trade detrimental to the national interest, to which the immediate interests of groups and individuals should be submitted. For List, the nation was an entity whose aim is not the creation of wealth by international exchange, but the development of its own economic and productive sources. "These views coincided so exactly with the reawakening of German nationalism that List's book caused a great sensation when it was published, and it remained for seventy years the theoretic gospel of the advocates of protectionist tariffs in Germany, Britain and the United States" (PMM).

Binding a little rubbed. Tiny defect to gutter of title leaves, usual mild browning throughout, a few leaves with a heavier, but mostly small brownstain to margins. A good copy.

References

Kress C.5545. PMM 311. Books That Made Europe, p. 210 ("The undisputed manifesto of nationalist economics").

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