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Whether building a road or fighting a war, leaders from ancient Mesopotamia to the present have relied on financial accounting to track their state's assets and guide its policies. Basic accounting tools such as auditing and double-entry bookkeeping form the basis of modern capitalism and the nation-state. Yet our appreciation for accounting and its formative role throughout history remains minimal at best - and we remain ignorant at our peril. The 2008 financial crisis is only the most recent example of how poor or risky practices can shake, and even bring down, entire societies.In The Reckoning, historian and MacArthur "Genius" Award-winner Jacob Soll presents a sweeping history of accounting, drawing on a wealth of examples from over a millennia of human history to reveal how accounting has shaped kingdoms, empires, and entire civilizations.



About the Author

Jacob Soll

Jacob Soll is Professor of History and Accounting at the University of Southern California.

He is the author of:

"Publishing The Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism" (2005)

"The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert's State Information System" (2009)

"The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations" (2014)

He is currently writing "Libraries of Freedom, Libraries of Power: The Enlightenment of Books 1640-1820"


Soll received a Diplome d'Etudes Approfondies from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris in 1995, a Ph.D. from Magdalene College, Cambridge, UK in 1998, and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2011.

He lives in Los Angeles, California

Jonathan Derbyshire
The world of ideas

Accounting and accountability
by Jonathan Derbyshire / April 29, 2014 / Leave a comment
In the latest issue of Prospect, John Kay begins his review of The Reckoning by the American historian Jacob Soll as follows: "If Prospect held a competition for the most improbable conjunction of author and quotation, my entry would pair Goethe with the observation that 'the system of book-keeping by double entry is among the finest inventions of the human mind.'" I'm tempted to say that almost as improbable is the fact that Soll has written a riveting book about the history of accountancy. But that would be unfair, because The Reckoning is really a book about political legitimacy and what makes a functioning state. As Kay points out, "Soll sees accounting as the key to accountability" - political accountability, that is. "Louis XIV discontinued Colbert's elaborate book-keeping system because the monarch could not bear the evidence of his own extravagance ... Public accounting is a powerful antidote to autocracy, Soll argues ... "

Last week I spoke to Soll, who is a professor of history and accounting at the University of Southern California. I began by asking him about the relationship between accounting and accountability.

JS: In English, the word "accountability" really does come from "accounting". It comes into use when the French Revolutionary constitution of 1793 is translated into English. "Compatabilité" becomes "accounting". There really is a strict relationship between the two notions.

JD: So there's a link between accounting, accountability and political legitimacy. Does it follow from that that there's a close relationship between accounting and democracy in particular?

As I wrote this book, I went to look at the places in which accounting was most prominent. And they were all in republics. There's a famous book by my friend and mentor J.G.A. Pocock called The Machiavellian



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