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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 51| June 2001


From More to Marx:
Gift of Rare Books from the Parliamentary Library

Title page of William Lyndwood's Provinciale seu constiutiones Anglis

A small but impressive collection of rare books covering politics, law and government from the 16th to the 19th centuries was recently transferred from the Parliamentary Library to the National Library. The books range from a third edition of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (printed in Basle in 1518) to the 1887 first English translation of volumes one and two of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.

Sir Thomas More’s Utopia first appeared in Latin in 1516 as De optimo reipublicae statu, deque nova insula Utopia (Concerning the highest state of the republic and the new island Utopia). The text was not translated into English until 1551, but is now easily accessible in various versions on the Internet—a complete facsimile of the edition acquired by the Library is at www.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/diglib/more/utopia/. Utopia is not the first book to describe an imaginary country with ideal laws and social conditions, but the name More invented for his vision of a perfect communist city state (from the Greek words ou, not or no, and topos or place) came to stand for all works describing a utopia, and by extension an impractical and usually impossibly ideal scheme for social improvement. Karl Marx’s vision of a classless society, developed in the political and economic system of communism, is prefigured by the common ownership of property in More’s Utopia.

The National Library previously held many of the titles in this acquisition only on microfilm or in 20th-century editions. The earliest item in this gift is nearly 500 years old. It is a large folio 1505 printing of Provinciale seu constitutiones Anglie, the best-known work of William Lyndwood (1375?–1446), the principal commentator on medieval English canon law. As well as More’s Utopia (which criticises the badly administered laws of European Christian states, such as those codified for England by Lyndwood), the other 16th-century works comprise a 1577 second edition of the influential French political philosopher Jean Bodin’s Les six livres de la République (first published 1576) and a 1573 Latin version of an essay on citizenship by the Roman statesman and writer Cicero.

Seventeenth century titles include what appears to be one of the first English translations of Niccolò Machiavelli’s Discourses and The Prince (1636), Sir Walter Raleigh’s The Privileges and Practice of Parliament (1628), Francis Bacon’s Operum moralium (1638) and Baconiana (1678), Thomas Smith’s The Commonwealth of England (1601 and 1633), legal works by Edward Coke (1642 and 1644), Oliver Cromwell’s Monarchy Asserted (1660), William Hakewill’s Modus tenendi Parliamentum, or, The Old Manner of Holding Parliaments in England (1671), Thomas Rymer’s A View of Government in Europe (1689), John Selden’s Of the Judicature of Parliaments (1681), George Petyt’s Lex parliamentaria, or, A Treatise of the Law and Custom of the Parliaments of England (1690) and a 1698 edition of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (first published in 1690).

The 18th-century component of this gift comprises the first English translation of the French political philosopher Charles-Louis de Montesquieu’s principal work, The Spirit of Laws (1750, first published in French in 1748); the English clergyman, political theorist and scientist Joseph Priestley’s An Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768); the famous jurist Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69); and Matthew Bacon’s A New Abridgment of the Law (1778). A small number of 19th- century works on English parliamentary practice, a first edition of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography (1873), and the first English version of the first two volumes of Karl Marx’s major work Das Kapital (1887) round off this acquisition.

Mill and Marx are among the most important intellectual figures of the 19th century. John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), the English philosopher and economist, is associated with utilitarianism, the doctrine that morality should be governed by utility, or more specifically the idea that the greatest good of the greatest number should guide public action. Mill received an extraordinarily rigorous education supervised by his ‘grim and exacting’ father, beginning the study of Greek at the age of three, and effectively achieving the status of a fully functioning thinking machine ‘with the advantage of a quarter of a century’ by the age of 14. However he suffered a severe crisis before he turned 21, which led him to reject utilitarianism’s narrow neglect of the emotions in favour of the intellect, and open up the movement founded by Jeremy Bentham and his father, James Mill, to the world of feelings and humanitarian values. Mill’s Autobiography, published in the year of his death, outlines his intellectual and moral development. Mill’s other important works (he also worked at the East India Company from 1823 to 1858 and was a Member of the House of Commons from 1865 to 1868) include A System of Logic (1843), Principles of Political Economy (1848), On Liberty (1859), Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Utilitarianism (1861), and The Subjection of Women (1869).

Karl Marx’s most famous work is The Communist Manifesto (1848), but Das Kapital (Capital), his immense analysis of capitalism occupying some 2500 pages, is his magnum opus. Marx originally planned to issue Das Kapital in four volumes but his death in 1883 prevented the completion of the fourth volume. Only the first volume, issued in 1867, appeared during his lifetime. Marx’s collaborator, Friedrich Engels, edited the second and third volumes, which were published in 1885 and 1894. Marx had great hopes for his work in England, but Capital failed to find a publisher until the volumes that have now entered the Library’s collection were translated from the third German edition and published in 1887.

This magnificent collection of rare books from the Parliamentary Library is still being catalogued but the books will soon be available for researchers.
Philip Jackson

Above: Title page of William Lyndwood’s Provinciale seu constitutiones Anglie (1505)

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