A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780226675268)

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.

Author: Mary Poovey
ISBN-10: 0226675262
ISBN-13: 9780226675268
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Language: English
Published: 11/15/1998
Pages: 436
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.36lbs
Size: 8.93h x 6.06w x 1.10d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 09/01/1998 pg. 198