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

Poovey, Mary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226675262 ISBN 13: 9780226675268

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

Book by Poovey Mary

Über diesen Titel

Reseña del editor

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.

Biografía del autor

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.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0226675262
• ISBN 13: 9780226675268
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Sprache: Englisch
• Auflage: 2
• Anzahl der Seiten: 445