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

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  • Louis Gottschalk Prize (2000)
Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.

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

Regular price $43.14
Unit price
per
ISBN: 9780226675268
Authors: Mary Poovey
Date of Publication: 1998-11-15
Format: Paperback
Related Collections: Economics, History, Science, Philosophy
Related Topics: History, Theory
Goodreads rating: 4.11
(rated by 36 readers)

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, 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.
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  • Louis Gottschalk Prize (2000)
Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.