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

Exploring such questions as "how did fact become modernity's most favoured unit of knowledge?", this text contains ideas and texts from the publication of the first British manual on double-entry bookkeeping in 1588 to the institutionalization of statistics in the 1830s. It 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.