Skip to content

History of the Modern Fact Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society

Best in textbook rentals since 2012!

ISBN-10: 0226675262

ISBN-13: 9780226675268

Edition: 1998

Authors: Mary Poovey

List price: $49.00
Shipping box This item qualifies for FREE shipping.
Blue ribbon 30 day, 100% satisfaction guarantee!
what's this?
Rush Rewards U
Members Receive:
Carrot Coin icon
XP icon
You have reached 400 XP and carrot coins. That is the daily max!

Description:

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,…    
Customers also bought

Book details

List price: $49.00
Copyright year: 1998
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication date: 11/15/1998
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 436
Size: 5.98" wide x 9.25" long x 0.96" tall
Weight: 1.342
Language: English

Mary Poovey is Samuel Rudin University Professor of the Humanities and professor of English at New York University. Her two most recent books, A History of the Modern Fact and Genres of the Credit Economy, examine the emergence of the modern disciplines. Her history of the modern financial model, co-authored with Kevin R. Brine, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

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