A History of the Modern Fact

by Poovey, Mary

• ISBN13: 9780226675251
• ISBN10: 0226675254
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-12-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS	ix	(2)
INTRODUCTION	xi
1. THE MODERN FACT, THE PROBLEM OF INDUCTION, AND QUESTIONS OF METHOD	1	(28)
Ancient Facts, Modern Facts	7	(9)
Methodological Considerations	16	(10)
Thematic Overview	26	(3)
2. ACCOMMODATING MERCHANTS: DOUBLE-ENTRY BOOKKEEPING, MERCANTILE EXPERTISE, AND THE EFFECT OF ACCURACY	29	(63)
"This Exquisite Deep-Diving Science"	33	(33)
From Rhetoric to Reason of State	66	(26)
3. THE POLITICAL ANATOMY OF THE ECONOMY: ENGLISH SCIENCE AND IRISH LAND	92	(52)
The Crisis in Knowledge and the Question of Method	97	(23)
William Petty, Ireland, and Economic Matters of Fact	120	(18)
The Authority of Mathematical Instruments	138	(6)
4. EXPERIMENTAL MORAL PHILOSOPHY AND THE PROBLEMS OF LIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY	144	(70)
Government by Taste in the Work of Defoe and Hume	157	(18)
Experimental Moral Philosophy	175	(22)
David Hume: From Experimental Moral Philosophy to the Essay	197	(17)
5. FROM CONJECTURAL HISTORY TO POLITICAL ECONOMY	214	(50)
Scottish Conjectural History	218	(18)
Description and System: The Constitution of Political Economy	236	(13)
The Detour through Scotland: Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands	249	(15)
6. RECONFIGURING FACTS AND THEORY: VESTIGES OF PROVIDENTIALISM IN THE NEW SCIENCE OF WEALTH	264	(43)
Institutionalizing Political Economy: Dugald Stewart and the Repudiation of Particulars	269	(9)
Thomas Malthus and the Revaluation of Numerical Representation	278	(17)
Popularizing Political Economy: J.R. McCulloch and the Taxonomy of Modern Knowledge	295	(12)
7. FIGURES OF ARITHMETIC, FIGURES OF SPEECH: THE PROBLEM OF INDUCTION IN THE 1830s	307	(22)
Statistics in the 1830s	308	(9)
John Herschel and John Stuart Mill: Induction, Deduction, and the Limits of Scientific Method	317	(8)
Poems and Systems: The Emergence of the Postmodern Fact	325	(4)
NOTES	329	(58)
BIBLIOGRAPHY	387	(22)
INDEX	409