Keeping the Books, Knowing the World: The Philosophy and Politics of Accounting in Central Europe, 1871–1945

• In Event: Technologies of Accounting: Science, Medicine, and Capitalism

English Abstract

Between the unification of Germany and the Second World War, Central European social scientists identified two aspects of calculation. One aspect was formal, algorithmic, objective, and impersonal, the other informal, intuitive, subjective, and, above all, personal. Initially, calculation’s formal and informal dimensions were seen as compatible, even inseparable. But by the middle of the 20th century, these qualities of calculation had come to seem irreconcilably opposed. This basic shift originated in turn-of-the-century discourses on accounting and bookkeeping in businesses and households. These everyday practices posed fundamental epistemological problems that ramified into postwar science, philosophy, and politics.
A political controversy occasioned this bifurcation of the concept of calculation. Following the October Revolution of 1917 and during the Great Depression, social scientists such as Max Weber, Otto Neurath, and F.A. Hayek turned to accountancy in their attempt to understand the workings of the market under capitalism, and to theorize alternatives to it. These economists and philosophers of science examined accounting and bookkeeping as historically contingent, situated practices; explored the relationship between calculation and human reason in general; or drew lessons for the philosophy of science from the experience of the market.
I show that accountancy and calculation were fundamental to economic and social thought in the German-speaking world throughout this long period. I also seek to recover a more holistic concept of calculation, capacious enough to include both formal and informal elements. In doing so, I reveal the ubiquity of accounting, bookkeeping, calculation, and quantitative expertise in corporate capitalism, and I query whether this knowledge could be produced, controlled, and employed in the public interest.

Author

• Max Ehrenfreund, Harvard University