Obedience to Authority

By Stanley Milgram

First UK edition, first impression. London: Tavistock Publications, 1974.

Original dark blue cloth, spine lettered in silver. A very good copy, with bumping to the upper corners, slight pushing to the spine ends, light toning and a few spots to the top edge, and a previous owner’s name to the front paste-down.

In the very good original, unclipped dust jacket with a tear at the foot of the rear flap fold, a couple of shallow chips, creasing to the upper corners and slight fading to the spine panel. Soft crease running down the upper flap with the printed £2.50 price faintly crossed through in pen.

A landmark of twentieth-century social psychology, presenting Milgram’s account of his celebrated and controversial experiments on obedience. Conducted at Yale in the early 1960s, the studies placed volunteers in the role of “teachers”, instructed to administer what they believed were increasingly powerful electric shocks to a “learner” whenever he answered incorrectly. The shocks were simulated and the learner was a confederate, but the participants’ willingness to continue under the experimenter’s direction raised disturbing questions about the relationship between authority and individual conscience.

Milgram argued that ordinary people could be induced to carry out harmful acts when they accepted an authority’s legitimacy and transferred responsibility for their actions to that authority. His work brought questions of obedience, resistance and moral responsibility into discussions extending far beyond psychology. Both the conduct of the experiments and the interpretation of their results have remained subjects of debate, contributing to the book’s enduring significance in the study of human behaviour.