Autograph manuscript, correction slips for Nachforschungen (Enquiries), [1797]

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827)
Autograph manuscript, correction slips for Nachforschungen (Enquiries), [1797]
In German. Six correction-slips comprising three single and three composite leaves composed of 2-4 fragments, various sizes from 55 x 110mm to 320 x 115mm, all but two written on both sides. Provenance: Hermann Krüsi (1775-1844, worked with Pestalozzi 1803-1816); J.A. Stargardt, 30 November 1988, lot 508.

'Power often has to throw the cloak of benevolence around its shoulders': correction-slips for Pestalozzi's major work, Enquiries into the Course of Nature in the Development of the Human Race. The corrections come from the earliest drafts of the work, in the section 'Was bin ich im gesellschaftlichen Zustand', and concern the relationship between government and people. See Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Ausgabe, 12 (Berlin, 1938), 81-84.

Pestalozzi is one of the great innovators in the history of education, bringing to the field a holistic, child-centred approach inspired by Rousseau. His Enquiries into the Course of Nature in the Development of the Human Race is his major theoretical work, inspired by a meeting with the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and although little read at the time it is his most significant exposition of the views on human nature which underlay his later achievements in education.