Our Economic Sickness : A Series of Pulpit Editorials

Boston: The Christopher Publishing House, 1934. First Edition. Hardcover. Very good/very good. First Edition. Hardcover. 8.25" x 5.5". First edition, presentation copy,signed and inscribed by the author 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.