Our Economic Sickness : A Series of Pulpit Editorials SIGNED FIRST EDITION

Published by The Christopher Publishing House, Boston, 1934

  • First Edition
  • Signed
  • Hardcover
  • Used
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Seller: Underground Books, ABAA, Indianapolis, IN, U.S.A.Underground Books, ABAA

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Hardcover

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First Edition. Hardcover. 8.25" x 5.5". First edition, presentation copy, signed and inscribed by Albert Emmanuel Kirk on the front free endpaper: "To R.G. Anderson, compliments, Albert E. Kirk." A remarkable work of Depression-era Social Gospel radicalism. Kirk, a Methodist Episcopal minister in Sterling, Kansas, delivered these fifteen essays as successive Sunday evening pulpit editorials, each followed by a sermon. The result is one of the more intellectually adventurous works of American religious political economy from the period. Kirk diagnoses the Depression not as a business failure but as a financial and structural one, marshaling heterodox authorities - Kropotkin on the economics of abundance, Henry George on the wedge of concentrated wealth, Thomas Carlyle on the passage from class competition to human brotherhood - in service of a thoroughgoing critique of laissez-faire capitalism delivered from a prairie pulpit. Part One (Diagnosis) identifies nine systemic factors: surplus production paradoxically coexisting with mass want; unprecedented concentration of wealth; structural unemployment; chaos in the money-credit system; unjust business manipulations including tax-free securities and wage suppression; enslaving debt at every level from tenant farming to federal government; governmental confusion; a tragic conflict between Christian ideals of cooperation and the competitive economic order; and the consequent deterioration of human welfare. Part Two (Remedial Suggestions) calls for clarifying government's role, stopping unjust manipulations, stabilizing the credit system, nationally planning industry, and - most strikingly - democratizing industry itself, giving workers a voice, a share of burdens, and participation in rewards. Kirk cites Kropotkin's Mutual Aid-era argument that scarcity is no longer nature's condition but a manufactured one, uses Henry George's imagery of a wedge driving humanity into deeper poverty, quotes Carlyle's vision of passing from class competition to human brotherhood, and endorses Roosevelt's New Deal as an "epochal" if incomplete recognition of what planning requires. His concluding word frames America's failure to close the gap between Christian brotherhood and competitive capitalism as the defining moral crisis of the age. Dedicated to the congregation of the Methodist Episcopal Church of Sterling, Kansas. Dark tan dust jacket with light chipping and edgewear. Red cloth boards with gilt lettering to upper board. Contents overall bright and clean, with substantial offsetting to pages 24-25 where some prior sheet must have been left. Very good book in very good jacket. Limited number of institutional holdings recorded in OCLC; scarce in the trade. …

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Bibliographic details

Title
Our Economic Sickness : A Series of Pulpit Editorials SIGNED FIRST EDITION
Author
Kirk, Albert Emmanuel
Publisher
The Christopher Publishing House, Boston
Publication year
1934
Condition
Very good
Dust jacket
very good
Signed
Signed
Binding
Hardcover
Edition
First Edition.
Seller catalogs
Economics & The History of Commerce, Radicals & Utopians, Spirituality & Religious Studies

Underground Books, ABAA

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Underground Books, ABAA is an online rare and antiquarian bookshop, founded in 2011 as a brick and mortar general bookstore of the same name in downtown Carrollton, Georgia, which is now operated by out former store manager as The Underground Bookshop. Co-owners Josh Niesse and Megan Bell met in 2011, just 10 days or so after Josh opened the doors of Underground Books, literally underground, several steps below street level in a 100-year-old basement in our historic downtown. Megan, an English student at the University of West Georgia, walked in, fell down the rabbit hole, and never left! Reader, we married in May of 2014, under the book arch that now resides at the bookshop. We are both proud alumni of the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar (CABS), and Megan additionally of Rare Book School at the University of Virginia and of the ABAA Women’s Initiative Mentorship Program. Like many booksellers with open brick-and-mortar stores, we are passionate generalists, but our specialties are in decorative publisher's cloth bindings; fairy tales, folklore, and mythology; popular science and natural history; the occult; and fine press books.…

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