HUGHES, H. Stuart; MACRAE, Donald Gunn

• Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought 1890–1930. Published Alfred A. Knopf, New York in 1958.

Description

• Original black cloth, spine lettered and ruled in gilt, front board stamped design. Spine tips minimally rubbed, corners slightly bumped, internally crisp and free from text block markings. A near fine, tight copy, lacking the dust jacket. Octavo.

• First edition, first printing of Hughes’s foundational treatise on European intellectual history. Hughes focuses closely on what he terms a ‘cluster of genius’ across Germany, France, and Italy: Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Benedetto Croce, Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche.

• An exceptional working copy containing handwritten research notes by the pioneering British sociologist Donald Gunn MacRae.

• Preserved within the volume is a double sided set of notes in MacRae’s hand on a 1964 Change of Address card. The notes trace specific page references throughout Hughes’s text and document MacRae’s analysis and the core debates of German sociology, specifically the Neo-Kantian and hermeneutic traditions.

• The recto features a bilingual terminological query regarding Max Weber’s central sociological concept: ‘Disenchantment – Entzauberung – Schiller/Weber?’, probing the linguistic origin of the term between the poet Friedrich Schiller and Weber.

• The verso contains a dense analysis of Heinrich Rickert and Wilhelm Dilthey’s divisions between the natural and social sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), recording in part:

• ‘Rickert – geisteswissenschaften are choice-permeated, for the loci of investigation are chosen, and such choices embody the choosers values (190-1)... Dilthey: nat. sci. / subject & object radically different : g.w. essentially the same.’

• Association copies with original notes from the upper tier of British academia are rare to market.