‘One of the Most Frightful Muddles I Have Ever Read’ (Keynes)
HAYEK, Friedrich August von; Lionel ROBBINS (foreword). Prices and Production. London: George Routledge & Sons, Ltd. 1931.
8vo. Original blue cloth, lettered in gilt to spine; pp. xv, [1], 112, [14 (advertisements)]; browning to endpapers, a little spotting to edges and first few leaves, but general a very good, clean copy; contemporary ownership inscription ‘T. I. Jones, Tŷ Clwyd, Ystrad Mynach, Ionawr 1932’ in black ink to front free endpaper, occasional pencil side-lining (see below).
First edition, scarce in commerce and narrowly preceding the first edition in German, of the most groundbreaking work by John Maynard Keynes’s arch-rival, our copy with contemporary Welsh provenance.
This is the second book by Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek (1899–1922), published when he was thirty-two; it appeared in German in the same year as Preise und Produktion (Vienna: Julius Springer). Prices and Production contains four lectures he delivered at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences between 1930 and 1931. It is regarded as his principal contribution to capital theory, examining interest rates and their effect on trade cycles. The work is also notable for introducing the Hayekian triangle as a means of analysing the structure of production.
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) was famously scathing in his assessment of Hayek’s book, describing it as ‘one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read’ and ‘an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end in Bedlam’ (Wapshott, p. 97). The lectures, however, were considered such a success that Hayek was offered the Tooke Chair of Economic Science and Statistics at LSE, a position he accepted in 1931.
This first edition of Prices and Production was published as number 107 in the ‘Monographs by Writers Connected with the London School of Economics and Political Science’ series, part of the LSE’s Studies in Economics and Political Science. Lionel Robbins (1898–1984), British economist and author of the foreword, was instrumental in Hayek’s appointment to the LSE, where he taught until his move to Chicago in 1950.
Provenance: From the library of Thomas Ieuan Jeffreys-Jones (1909–1967), lecturer of political history and economics at Coleg Harlech and later warden. At the time of the inscription in the present volume, he had just graduated with first-class honours in Economics at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire in Cardiff.
Cody & Ostrem B-2; see Wapshott, Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics, 2012.
SKU: 2120892