Article ID: CBB001214721

Finding the Money: Public Accounting, Political Arithmetic, and Probability in the 1690s (2013)

unapi

Finding the money---whether money lost, hidden, or needed---became a defining practical and epistemological problem in the decade after the 1688 Revolution. It was a problem that linked together actors in fiscal administration, parliamentary politics, and economic theory, and drove innovative new applications of numerical calculation to political reasoning. In the debates on monarchical revenues that arose in 1689, a crisis of knowledge engulfed Parliament as MPs discovered how few among them had any insight into the nation's fiscal well-being. A parliamentary Commission of Public Accounts, formed in 1690, learned that even a basic financial assessment was extraordinarily difficult. Yet the commission's travails also revealed numerical calculations to be a potent political tool, which empowered relative outsiders to make incisive criticisms without complete information. Such combative political computation was systematized in the political arithmetick of Charles Davenant, who provided a novel political rationale for the value of probable knowledge.

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Authors & Contributors
Lopes, Quintino
Santos Pereira, Elisabete J.
Turner, Chris
Orbay, Kayhan
Yokoyama, Hiromi M.
Wellenreuther, Hermann
Concepts
Science and politics
Science and economics
Science and government
Funding and finance
Government sponsored science
Colonialism
Time Periods
18th century
17th century
20th century, late
21st century
20th century, early
20th century
Places
Great Britain
United States
Japan
Germany
Atlantic world
Arctic regions
Institutions
Royal Society of London
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