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

A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. By Mary Poovey (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998) 419 pp. $49.00 cloth $17.00 paper.

The concept of fact is fundamental in the modern world. Poovey has written a history of that idea--not of any empirical field, such as natural history or statistics, but of the notion of facticity itself. It is an inquiry into the epistemological space of the fact.

Poovey starts with the first manual of double entry bookkeeping, Luca Pacioli's Particularis de Computis et Scripturis (1494). Here, in the logging of the merchant's transactions, the recording of details really mattered. But here, too, the peculiar feature of the fact surfaced. Facts were not just "deracinated" particulars; they were parts of systems, integral to abstract generalizations. The ledger attested to the merchant's honesty, but, more generally, to trade as an economic system. It was a formal system of writing, the systematic character of which transcended the particulars that were recorded. Moreover, the precision of numerical notation and calculation stood in for the accuracy of the information recorded.

Poovey calls the displacement of accuracy into precision "gestural mathematics": What was precise was also universally the case. Down-to-earth practical trade records were abstracted, formalized, and quantified. They comprised the first nexus of the tension between particulars, shorn of implication, and generalities, which were beyond any single case and were therefore hypothetical. Debits and credits sometimes did not match, but the formal structure of accounting represented the idea of an economy as an abstract system.

In philosophy, gathering particulars into generalizations that transcend them, yet are reliably educed from them, is the problem of induction. In social and economic history, it refers to the credibility of disinterested, plain-speaking witnesses, whether they were merchants, whose honesty guaranteed their creditworthiness, or scientific observers who attested to what was observed and who institutionalized their practice in organizations, such as the Royal Society of London.

The fact exists in a new epistemological space between the particular and the general, but it has never wholly filled this space. The gaps, however, have been reduced by the implication of generality carried in the particular. Poovey concentrates on the mode of argument of the text, because it delimited what could be said, and the formalization abstracted the general from the particular. For Poovey, political economy was more akin to experimental moral philosophy (sociability based on general laws of subjectivity) than to political arithmetic (enumerating social details), because they presumed an abstract systemic order.

Since she is interested in the shaping up of an epistemological possibility, Poovey interrupts the tendency to see the unfolding of a logic, materialized in the progressive history of a discipline. She reads a text for what the author intended, but also as (mis)understood by others, to elicit what was possible, though neither intended nor yet articulated. Epistemological openings for the fact occurred, not only in philosophical discourse, as in reaction to David Hume's skepticism, but also in social and institutional thought. Thus the philosophical conundrum of induction--the relationship of particular to general--was also the problem of coalescing individuals into a civil society--that is, the problem of governability, as discussed in works by, for example, Defoe and Shaftesbury--and could be institutionalized in the relationship between two professions, statistics and political economy, as advocated by McCulloch. ¹

The "fact" is thus the nexus of many interests, each of which could be studied historically in its own right. Instead, Poovey explores the very possibility of the fact, upon which disciplines that need facts could be built. At a deeper level, the way that the particular is redolent with the general, and the general is instantiated in, or checked against, the particular, exemplifies the continuous dialogue between observation...