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

Poovey, Mary

ISBN 10: 0226675262 / ISBN 13: 9780226675268

Published by University Of Chicago Press, U.S.A., 1998

About this Item

First Trade Paperback Edition (Number Line With The One Present). Includes Bibliographical References, Index And Chapter Notes. Yellow Pictorial Wraps With Black Lettering On The Spine. Seller Inventory # 037067

Bibliographic Details

Title: A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of ...

Publisher: University Of Chicago Press, U.S.A.

Publication Date: 1998

Binding: Trade Paperback

Condition: Fine

Edition: First Thus

About this title

Synopsis:

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.

About the Author:

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.