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Speakers): Jacob Soll

The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations

There has been talk recently of the possible demise of capitalism due to population curves.  This presentation seeks to complicate this argument by showing a history of capitalism based not on numerical constants, but rather on long cultural traditions, in particular double-entry bookkeeping and the construction of financially accountable societies.  Good bookkeeping makes for good government—but not for very long—according to this history of accounting in the public sphere. In this talk, historian and MacArthur fellow Soll surveys public financial record keeping after the invention of double-entry accounting in 13th-century Tuscany, a breakthrough that made systematic analysis of profit and loss possible. The benefits for well-ordered, responsible government were felt wherever this innovation was embraced: medieval Italian city-states, 17th-century Holland, and 18th-century Britain all became economic and geopolitical powerhouses, he argues, thanks to well-kept government books. But this is even more a story of backsliding and failure, as corruption, spendthrift government, and factional intrigues perennially undermine the discipline of meticulous public accounting—and the state. Soll will highlight both the political impact of accounting practices—a public audit of Louis XVI’s woeful state finances helped spark the French Revolution—and the advent of a “culture of accountability” as the bourgeois business classes rose to power; and he will explore the deep-seated religious and philosophical power of balanced-books metaphors in the West, from the Gospel of Matthew to Thoreau’s championing of the simple life. He will show that numbers themselves do not equal financial progress and clarity.

Jacob Soll is a MacArthur Fellow (2011) and the author of numerous essays, articles, and books, including Publishing The Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism 1513-1789 (2009), The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colberts Secret State Intelligence System (2011), and most recently, The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations (2014).

This event is free and open to the public.