‎JUSTI, J.H.G. VON.‎
‎Die Natur und das Wesen der Staaten, als die Grundwissenschaft der Staatskunst, der Policey, und aller Regierungswissenschaften, desgleichen als die Quelle aller Gesetze abgehandelt.‎

‎Berlin, Stettin und Leipzig, im Verlag Johann Heinrich Rüdigers, 1760. Woodcut head and tail-pieces and initials. (14), 488, (32) pp. 8vo. Contemporary boards, paper label to spine with handwritten title (label with some loss), spine a bit discoloured. Higgs 2415; Humpert 7492; Masui p. 916; Menger, column 51; not in Kress; not in Goldsmiths; not in Einaudi; not in Mattioli; uncommon: NUC, RLIN and OCLC list copies at Harvard, Chicago, and Columbia only. First edition of Justi's most explicit treatise on political philosophy. In this work 'Justi became a theoretician of the proper relation between state and civil society and postulated Polizey (administrative science) as the means of mediating between them. Increasingly, Justi derived state institutions and law not from natural law but from the social processes and individual psychological desires (for survival, self-aggrandizement, and happiness) that he thought animated society. That is, he shifted the foundation for his political philosophy from the state to civil society.Consequently, Justi advocated curtailing the reach of government in economic regulation, to ensure growth and prosperity; in private home, to protect the innocent freedom of individuals; in law, to remove superfluous moral or religious injunctions, and in censorship, to encourage the development of enlightened public opinion. (.....) Justi did describe the outlines of a liberal future by calling for the separation of powers, the principle of private property, major legal reform, and an independent judiciary (though his legal recommendations were less developed than those of many of his contemporaries), an economy liberalized for expansion, a temperate state, and an active sphere of public opinion. More remarkably, Justi anticipated many of the basic liberal assumptions regarding public and private domains, gender, sexuality, and education that were fully developed only in the nineteenth century. (.....) Perhaps Justi's greatest practical achievement was making cameral political theory accessible to literate Germans and thus helping to create a public capable of criticizing government on behalf of a civil society whose active sovereignty he only haltingly admitted' (Isabel V. Hull in: Encycopedia of the Enlightenment, vol. ii, pp 324-5). - A very nice copy, some scattered spotting, title-page lightly browned, entirely uncut. ‎

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