Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View Milgram, Stanley Philosophy,Politics,Psychology,Signed,Sociology

First edition, first printing. Association copy signed by Stanley Milgram on the front free endpaper and inscribed to famous jurist and political scientist Hans Morgenthau, "with warm good wishes to a man of profound perception, dazzling intellect, and humane values." xvii, [3], 224 pp. Bound in publisher's black cloth stamped in gilt. Near Fine with very light wear and edge fading to covers and faint staining to lower edge of front pastedown. In a Near Fine unclipped dust jacket with light fading to spine panel, edge toning to flaps, soft crease near upper edge of rear panel, and several stains along upper and lower edges visible on flaps and verso. Morgenthau's signature impressed into front panel, presumably because the recipient used the book as a writing base possibly to write a thank-you letter. A significant copy of a major work of 20th century psychology. From the library of Hans Morgenthau, a German-American legal scholar and foreign policy expert. Morgenthau was a consultant to the Defense Department from 1962 to 1965, but was dismissed for opposing the Vietnam War on the basis of a principle he had set down in his 1948 book Politics among Nations: never put yourself in a position from which you cannot retreat without loss of face and from which you cannot advance without undue risk. Stanley Milgram was a social psychologist, 30 years younger than the object of his admiration. His doctoral dissertation compared conformity levels in Norway and France, and as an assistant professor at Yale he carried out the most famous experiment on obedience to authority in social science history. Forty male participants were told to administer painful electric shocks to a "learner," actually an amateur actor feigning pain, every time he answered a question incorrectly. The majority of participants increased the voltage by degrees to levels that would have been lethal had they been real, merely because they were told to do so by the man acting the role of "experimenter." The publication of the study prompted furious debate and soul-searching about the nature of humanity, and upended Milgram s thesis that Germans were more submissive to authority than Americans. Both Milgram, whose relatives had survived concentration camps, and Morgenthau, who fled Germany in the 1930s due to anti-Semitic persecution, were deeply concerned with the origins of Nazism. Contemporaries also saw the experiment's relevance to the then-ongoing Vietnam War. This association copy of the most detailed account of the Milgram experiments is an intriguing testament to the association between two key molders of 20th century American morality.