A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society / Edition 1

How did the fact become modernity's most favored unit of knowledge? How did description come to seem separable from theory in the precursors of economics and the social sciences?

Mary Poovey explores these questions in A History of the Modern Fact, ranging across an astonishing array of texts and ideas from the publication of the first British manual on double-entry bookkeeping in 1588 to the institutionalization of statistics in the 1830s. She shows how the production of systematic knowledge from descriptions of observed particulars influenced government, how numerical representation became the privileged vehicle for generating useful facts, and how belief--whether figured as credit, credibility, or credulity--remained essential to the production of knowledge.

Illuminating the epistemological conditions that have made modern social and economic knowledge possible, A History of the Modern Fact provides important contributions to the history of political thought, economics, science, and philosophy, as well as to literary and cultural criticism.

ISBN-13: 9780226675268

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Publication Date: 11-15-1998

Pages: 436

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

Mary Poovey has recently retired from her position as Samuel Rudin University Professor in the Humanities at New York University. She is the author of numerous books, including A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society and Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain.

What People are Saying About This

Steven Shapin

Essential reading for anyone concerned with how and why we have come to distinguish 'is' from 'ought,' the 'objective' from the 'subjective,' and 'individuality' from 'human nature.'

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1: The Modern Fact, the Problem of Induction, and Questions of Method
2: Accommodating Merchants: Double-Entry Bookkeeping, Mercantile Expertise, and the Effect of Accuracy
3: The Political Anatomy of the Economy: English Science and Irish Land
4: Experimental Moral Philosophy and the Problems of Liberal Governmentality
5: From Conjectural History to Political Economy
6: Reconfiguring Facts and Theory: Vestiges of Providentialism in the New Science of Wealth
7: Figures of Arithmetic, Figures of Speech: The Problem of Induction in the 1830s
Notes
Bibliography
Index Show More