London: Printed for J. Debrett, opposite Burlington-House, Piccadilly, 1784. First English edition. Octavo. Three-quarter leather and marbled boards with gold tooling and gilt title to spine; cover beautifully refurbished by master bookbinder Scott K. Kellar, with new black endpapers; small bookseller notations in pencil to front flyleaf and minor spotting to front and rear leaves, else pages exceptionally bright. Near-fine in a handsomely restored binding. Item #100

First English edition of Abbé de Mably’s (1709–1785) letters to John Adams on the American approach to government as found in the laws of the thirteen colonies. Mably, a popular French writer, historian, and philosopher, met Adams in Paris while Adams was visiting in late 1782 as chief of the American delegation to negotiate a peace treaty with England. Adams recorded that he and Mably discussed Mably’s interest in composing a work on the constitutions found within America, and Mably would later maintain that he wrote his Remarks at Adams’s urging. Mably and other French observers of the American Revolution were keenly interested in the form that the American government would take following the revolution, and in his Remarks Mably evaluates the constitutions found within the American colonies—in particular, those of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Georgia—and offers advice on the framework for a national constitution, urging a loose federation of states in lieu of a strong central government. Adams would subsequently publish his influential A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787), acknowledging that Mably, Turgot, Price, and others had all advanced important critiques of the American constitutions to which he was responding. Mably’s thought would prove influential in the egalitarian movements that gained favor following his death. Indeed, Mably was an early proponent of communistic land ownership and critic of the idle, inherited wealth that typified much of Europe’s gentry classes. This bright first English edition offers a fascinating perspective on the future of a young and fledgling United States—seen through the eyes of one of France’s most astute and prescient political minds.

Price: $1,400.00