Breakdown by Briffault Robert (3 results)

Hardcover. 273pp. General wear and sun fading to the cover else good condition with text clean and binding sound without dust jacket.

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good+. No Dust Jacket. Original cloth. Spine sunned/ridged, trace foxing. Tight and square. ; 8vo 8" - 9" tall.

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Good. 1st Edition. "THE PRESENT TIMES CALL FOR TWO VIRTUES ABOVE ALL OTHERS: MORAL COURAGE AND INTELLECTUAL HONESTY. THE LATTER IS ONLY A FORM OF MORAL COURAGE." FIRST US EDITION. Briffault was a French‑born surgeon who became a notable social anthropologist, sociologist, and writer, blending medical training with wide‑ranging intellectual inquiry. After medical studies and practice (including service as a decorated officer in World War I), he settled in England and devoted himself to social theory and anthropology. He would spend much of the 1930s in Paris, becoming a best-selling author, though he found himself trapped by the Nazi occupation of France, unable to secure a visa to join his American wife in the US. Briffault died in Hastings in 1941, having fallen ill with tuberculosis after reportedly spending the previous four years as sort of a homeless wanderer around Europe. Briffault is likely best known for his 1927 book The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions (separately subtitled the Matriarchal Theory of Social Origins) in which he argued for Briffault's Law: that the female, not the male, was the primary determiner of all the conditions of the animal family. Briffault said of Breakdown, which examines various causes of what he saw to be ongoing civilization collapse, that it contained a fresh idea on each of its 273 pages. The text was reissued by Coward-McCann, Inc. in 1935; it was also published for the first time in London in that year. Rare with the attractive first edition jacket. BOOK: Original blue cloth boards faded; binding a little fragile but sound; internally clean and unmarked. DJ: Unclipped jacket a little darkened to spine and extremities, nicked at corners, hinges (some splitting to front hinge, secured in mylar), and spine ends, but holds together soundly, presenting fully and attractively.…