Bodin, Jean. Paris 1578. Sur Le Rehaussement Et Diminution Des Monnoyes For Sale

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HUGELY IMPORTANT, GROUNDBREAKING ECONOMIC WORK DEALING WITH THE CAUSES OF INFLATION.
THE FIRST WORK TO PROPOSE THE QUANTITY THEORY OF MONEY.BODIN, Jean. Discours de Jean Bodin sur le rehaussement et diminution des monnoyes, tant d'or que d'argent et le moyen d'y remédier et response aux Paradoxes de Monsieur de Malestroict.(with)
MALESTROIT, Jean de. Les paradoxes du seigneur de Malestroict, conseiller du roy, & maistre ordinaire de ses comptes, sur le faict des monnoyes, presentez a sa maieste, au mois de Mars, 1566. Auec la responce de Iean Bodin ausdicts ParadoxesParis chez Iacques du Puys, 1578.
8vo. Part I (of two). 75+11 unnumbered leaves. d-z4, Aa-Bb4, two text leaves, H4 and I1, inverted, without blanks Y4 and Bb4. Roman letter, prefaces, titles and side-notes in Italic. Woodcut printer’s device of Christ at the well on second title, grotesque headpiece, historiated and floriated woodcut initials. Title slightly dusty with small oil stain in lower blank margin, light age toning, a few contemporary marginal notes and underlining, cut a little close with some side notes fractionally trimmed. A good copy, disbound.
Exceptionally rare contemporary edition of this text, one of the most important and influential economic texts of the sixteenth century. The work was first published in 1568 and was reprinted in this second edition along with a second part by Francois Garrault, not present in this copy. Garrault’s text is of no historical importance.
EXCEPTIONALLY RARE. ONLY ONE COPY OF THIS EDITION HAS COME TO sale IN THE LAST 40 YEARS.
This second edition is exceptionally rare on the market. The last and only copy recorded at sale was at Sothebys, Dec 2, 1994, lot 420, hammer price £2,200 ($3,410), which sold to the celebrated London book dealers Quaritch. The first edition of 1568 is unfindable, it has never appeared at sale and is recorded in one copy only at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.
THE FIRST WORK TO ARGUE THE QUANTITY THEORY OF MONEY.
“In 1566, M. de Malestroict, master of accounts on the making of money, published his work, Paradoxes, to demonstrate that contrary to popular opinion in France, real prices had not risen over the past three centuries. In other words, the value of money had remained proportional to the amount of gold and silver it contained. For example, concerning inflation, Malestroict posited that although the price of land and property may have increased since the reign of St. Louis IX, inflation was not the culprit. Instead he believed that it was the decreasing amount of gold and silver which the money contained that caused prices to rise. Malestroict was convinced, following the opinions of the time, that gold and silver were representative values that were not influenced by the fluctuations of world markets. Also, while the price of various items might increase, the items were worth a constant amount of gold or silver which did not fluctuate. Because wealth is judged by the quantity of money, “the metals are the true and fair judges of market value or the price of items.”Bodin refuted this argument and concentrated on the question of the abundance of gold and silver which he considered the principal and singular cause for the high prices of his era. “Previously no one had offered such an argument,” he says. In this matter he added two other secondary causes for high prices: the monopolies of merchants and craftsmen, who gathered in guilds and confraternities to establish the price of goods according to their own whims, as well as the scarcity of luxury goods. According to Bodin, war was another cause of rising prices: it creates shortages and therefore causes goods to become more expensive. Bodin posited that the solution to this lay in ending conflicts, since then the parties could occupy themselves with trade amongst themselves rather than waging war. In his opinion on the relationship between money and the price of goods, Bodin advocated an exchange, “which must be honest and free for the wealth and the grandeur of the realm.” He was opposed to the dominant opinion of his day, which was that of Malestroict, and which held that the solution to inflation was to attribute legal values to money by royal edict. For Bodin, the price of gold and silver should be set by the laws of the market, in other words by supply and demand. Hoping to advance these new ideas, Bodin was worried for people overwhelmed by inflation. According to Bodin a ruler “who changes the price of gold and silver ruins his people, country and himself.” Stanford encyclopedia of Philosophy.
ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT AND GROUNDBREAKING ECONOMIC TEXTSOF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
“Many economic ideas where stated by many years before they were developed into formal theories. While the quantity theory of money was more formally developed in the and 19th century by writers such as John Stuart Mill and Irving Fisher, earlier writers like Jean Bodin came to much similar conclusions many years before them. Bodin was one of the first thinkers to look at how growth in the money supply affected price levels and while he did not develop any mathematical description or fully describe the mechanism at work, he did lay the foundation that later writers would build upon.Jean Bodin's most important contribution to economic thought was the development of the foundation of the quantitative theory of money. Bodin theorized that the rise in prices that had occurred in France over the past few hundred years had been caused by the increase in the amount of gold and silver in the nation. Bodin realized that practices such as debasement, clipping and the importation of gold and silver all functioned to increase the supply of money relative to goods. Bodin writes in his work entitled Responses aux paradoxes du sieur de Malestroict that, "The principle and almost only [cause of rising prices] is the abundance of gold and silver, which is today much greater in this Kingdom [today] than it was four hundred years ago" (Monroe 127). Bodin goes on to give historical examples of how increases in the supply of gold and silver led to increased prices, such as in Rome after the conquering of Macedonia. (Monroe 127) He then shows how large amounts of gold and silver have flowed into France from the new world and other sources. (Monroe 129)” Joe Raia.
Adams B2228. Goldsmiths' 00196. Kress 123.
Monroe, A. E. (Ed.). (2006). Early Economic Thought: Selected Writings from Aristotle to Hume. Mineola : Dover .Spiegel, H. W. (1991). The Growth of Economic Thought. Durham: Duke University Press.

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