Cloth: 978-0-226-67525-1 | Paper: 978-0-226-67526-8 | Electronic: 978-0-226-67518-3
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226675183.001.0001
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ABOUT THIS BOOK
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
1. The Modern Fact, the Problem of Induction, and Questions of Method
Ancient Facts, Modern Facts
Methodological Considerations
Thematic Overview
2. Accommodating Merchants: Double-Entry Bookkeeping, Mercantile Expertise, and the Effect of Accuracy
“This Exquisite Deep-Diving Science”
From Rhetoric to Reason of State
3. The Political Anatomy of the Economy: English Science and Irish Land
The Crisis in Knowledge and the Question of Method
William Petty, Ireland, and Economic Matters of Fact
The Authority of Mathematical Instruments
4. Experimental Moral Philosophy and the Problems of Liberal Governmentality
Government by Taste in the Work of Defoe and Hume
Experimental Moral Philosophy
David Hume: From Experimental Moral Philosophy to the Essay
5. From Conjectural History to Political Economy
Scottish Conjectural History
Description and System: The Constitution of Political Economy
The Detour through Scotland: Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands
6. Reconfiguring Facts and Theory: Vestiges of Providentialism in the New Science of Wealth
Institutionalizing Political Economy: Dugald Stewart and the Repudiation of Particulars
Thomas Malthus and the Revaluation of Numerical Representation
Popularizing Political Economy: J. R. McCulloch and the Taxonomy of Modern Knowledge
7. Figures of Arithmetic, Figures of Speech: The Problem of Induction in the 1830s
Statistics in the 1830s
John Herschel and John Stuart Mill: Induction, Deduction, and the Limits of Scientific Method
Poems and Systems: The Emergence of the Postmodern Fact
Notes
Bibliography
Index