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A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society
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.
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.
436 pages, Paperback
First published November 15, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 9, 2012
In contrast to the wordiness of this book, I will keep my review of it concise.
What we conceive of as "fact" today is a modern invention in which theories about how to discern and represent objective truth in the world coalesced around our conceptions of scientific induction, moral philosophy, and rhetorical styles in the 15th-18th centuries. In other words, what we consider fact today sure ain't what it used to be. And in her genealogy, Poovey suggests that today's fact is just as arbitrary as ancient ones.
So, five stars for the subject matter and her Foucauldian historiography focusing on noticability and evolving styles of reasoning rather than the typical history's hunt for actors and origins. Three stars for her writing, which is verbose, repetitive, and at times turgid. I'm really glad I read it, but just as glad I won't have to read it again.
What we conceive of as "fact" today is a modern invention in which theories about how to discern and represent objective truth in the world coalesced around our conceptions of scientific induction, moral philosophy, and rhetorical styles in the 15th-18th centuries. In other words, what we consider fact today sure ain't what it used to be. And in her genealogy, Poovey suggests that today's fact is just as arbitrary as ancient ones.
So, five stars for the subject matter and her Foucauldian historiography focusing on noticability and evolving styles of reasoning rather than the typical history's hunt for actors and origins. Three stars for her writing, which is verbose, repetitive, and at times turgid. I'm really glad I read it, but just as glad I won't have to read it again.
October 16, 2019
Mary Poovey's extraordinary analysis begins, as she notes in the introduction, with her noting a curious shift that occurs in historical discourse, in which numbers somehow acquire an authority and trustworthiness in describing reality that they simply did not possess in earlier periods. This apparent objectivity of numbers and statistics, in other words, is not a natural state of affairs, but the product of a long historical debate about knowledge, reality, and what can be trusted when attempting to describe the world.
Chapter 1 begins by reflecting on what exactly we mean by a fact. A fact is usually thought of as a particular, a particular that in turn needs to be understood within the larger context or system of which it is a part. That said, there have been different ways of approaching this question of the fact. The ancient, Aristotelian way was to look upon facts as things that confirmed the order of things, as "commonplaces." This way of looking at things is overturned in the seventeenth century by Francis Bacon, who reverses Aristotle's perspective by asking how we account for those facts that don't fit into the commonplace, that disrupt the system.
Poovey locates Bacon's revolutionary new perspective within a larger discourse that owes an explicit debt to Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern. Latour argues that early thinkers of modernity, from Bacon to Boyle to Hobbes, engaged in a false separation of nature and society. On one side, there is the objective reality, on the other, the discourse that describes it. This division makes possible a theoretical separation between "objective" or "scientific" description of facts, and their political interpretation.
Poovey's task, then, is to question and interrogate this separation, to reveal the extent to which knowledge and interpretation, fact and rhetoric are inextricably intertwined with each other. The emphasis on numbers and statistics, which is grounded in a denial of rhetoric in favor of "plain speaking" and "hard facts," is just one strategy among many that conceals the reality that numbers are also selective and interpretive. To prove this point, Poovey signals her intention of looking at the historical tools that were developed to promote the illusion of the modern fact, beginning with the phenomenon of double-entry book-keeping.
Chapter 1 begins by reflecting on what exactly we mean by a fact. A fact is usually thought of as a particular, a particular that in turn needs to be understood within the larger context or system of which it is a part. That said, there have been different ways of approaching this question of the fact. The ancient, Aristotelian way was to look upon facts as things that confirmed the order of things, as "commonplaces." This way of looking at things is overturned in the seventeenth century by Francis Bacon, who reverses Aristotle's perspective by asking how we account for those facts that don't fit into the commonplace, that disrupt the system.
Poovey locates Bacon's revolutionary new perspective within a larger discourse that owes an explicit debt to Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern. Latour argues that early thinkers of modernity, from Bacon to Boyle to Hobbes, engaged in a false separation of nature and society. On one side, there is the objective reality, on the other, the discourse that describes it. This division makes possible a theoretical separation between "objective" or "scientific" description of facts, and their political interpretation.
Poovey's task, then, is to question and interrogate this separation, to reveal the extent to which knowledge and interpretation, fact and rhetoric are inextricably intertwined with each other. The emphasis on numbers and statistics, which is grounded in a denial of rhetoric in favor of "plain speaking" and "hard facts," is just one strategy among many that conceals the reality that numbers are also selective and interpretive. To prove this point, Poovey signals her intention of looking at the historical tools that were developed to promote the illusion of the modern fact, beginning with the phenomenon of double-entry book-keeping.
September 18, 2025
Romantic view of rhetoric needs more tangible sources for bold claims
March 27, 2018
Scrupulous and careful, Mary Poovey's historical investigation into epistemological developments in the knowledge of political reason and economic measurement and philosophy is an excellent, even irreplaceable resource. I read this for almost two months - taking hours to read each chapter, letting the information settle - and still feel like there is so much to go back to inside it. I'm interested in Poovey's other books. Best yet, I feel that the two decades since this was published have not aged it at all; her concern with historical sympathy and her rejection of overdetermination give her work accuracy, while her awareness of power and inequity hone her razorlike analyses.
Granted, she frequently succumbs to density of prose over the snappiness of accessible text. Even so, her work in restoring the lines of transformation that took a merchant's innovation - the double entry bookkeeping system - and the conceptual tools of experimental moral philosophy into the strange new world of political economy and statistical reason is breathtaking. Highly recommended, if you can find it!
Granted, she frequently succumbs to density of prose over the snappiness of accessible text. Even so, her work in restoring the lines of transformation that took a merchant's innovation - the double entry bookkeeping system - and the conceptual tools of experimental moral philosophy into the strange new world of political economy and statistical reason is breathtaking. Highly recommended, if you can find it!
February 6, 2019
This was an odd book to rate because it contained both a lot of phenomenal and unpleasant aspects. It creates a paradigm shifting picture of knowledge and representations of information, as discrete pieces of info and as parts of cohesive systems, developed throughout the early modern period, but suffers both from a substantial degree of subject drift throughout the text that isn't connected well between sections, as well as a writing style which tends to mirror the language of 18th century philosophers more often than it draws a bridge to contemporary usage
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews