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Published by EH.NET (September 1999) 
 
Mary Poovey, _A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of  
Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society_. Chicago:  
University of Chicago Press, 1998. xxv + 419 pp. $49.00 (cloth),  
ISBN: 0-226-67525-4; $17.00 (paper), ISBN: 0-226-67526-2.   
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by Tim Alborn, Department of History, Lehman  
College, CUNY. <[log in to unmask]>   
 
Economic historians don't tend to think much about epistemology. As  
they trace unfolding developments in the economy, though,  
epistemology has a way of sneaking up on them. To cite an example  
from the recent past, _The Economist_ this past July commented on  
the difficulty of squaring the enormous optimism generated by the new  
information-technology economy (reflected in the booming stock  
market) with the plainly unimpressive growth rates in all sectors of the  
economy barring computer sales. This was apparently "a sad case of  
the irresistible story meeting the immovable statistic," claimed the  
magazine. As if to drive home the underlying epistemological quandary,  
the accompanying editorial (and magazine cover) was titled: "How real  
is the new economy?"   
 
In _A History of the Modern Fact_, Mary Poovey reinterprets classic  
texts in political economy, philosophy, and statistics in order to locate  
the historical origins of what she claims is a peculiarly modern dilemma.  
Whether charting economic growth or planetary motion, she claims, we  
moderns feel the need to ground our claims in immovable statistics; yet  
at the same time we are compelled to find a transcendent meaning (an  
irresistible story) in the mass of details. Poovey brings to this project  
the perspective of a literary critic who has, in the past, turned her  
attention to putatively non "literary" topics like Florence Nightingale  
and poor law reform. Her recent appointment as director of the  
Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge at NYU has  
provided her with an institutional base from which to pursue the  
ambitious, and clearly historical, agenda for which _A History of the  
Modern Fact_ is a blueprint.   
 
It is indeed an ambitious book. One is tempted to apply to it Daniel  
Defoe's definition of "project", which Poovey quotes (p. 158): "a vast  
undertaking, too big to be managed." The narrative moves from late- 
16th century British book-keeping manuals; through the debate between  
Gerald de Malynes and Thomas Mun on Britain's money supply;  
William Petty's writings on political arithmetic; Defoe's essays on  
"projects" and mercantile conduct; Earl Shaftesbury on sociability;  
David Hume on conjectural history; Samuel Johnson on the Outer  
Hebrides; and Smith and Malthus on political economy, before  
concluding with a chapter on John Stuart Mill and the astronomer John  
Herschel. On the way, she has much to say about the history of  
classical rhetoric, moral philosophy, scientific societies, and the  
problem of induction. And for the most part, she succeeds at holding  
all these topics together by keeping in focus her subjects' diverse  
efforts to solve the same problem: how to produce systematic  
knowledge about society in an era when the political basis of social  
order was being transformed?   
 
Two important contexts for this problem appear in the book's opening  
chapters: classical (or Ciceronian) rhetoric, which dominated the way  
Renaissance writers made arguments; and "reason of state" theories  
which viewed politics in terms of sound principles which an absolute  
monarch could then impose on his subjects. Poovey describes most of  
her subjects as struggling against one or both of these conventions on  
their way to inventing a new way of analyzing society. Double-entry  
bookkeeping, for instance, substituted plain-speaking numbers for  
Ciceronian excess, in the process selling the precision of balance  
sheets as a proxy for mercantile virtue. Thomas Mun similarly pitched  
his arguments against centralized monetary policy both by his recourse  
to precise-sounding (but wholly illustrative) figures depicting the  
balance of trade and by his defense of mercantile rules and expertise.  
And Daniel Defoe moved from tracing the tangible effects of mercantile  
enterprise (in his _Essays upon Several Projects_) to writing a conduct  
manual for merchants (his _Compleat English Tradesman_), once he  
had determined that real-world merchants were not capable of rising to  
his vicarious ambitions.   
 
As all these examples suggest, Poovey is especially interested in what  
might be called the communitarian origins of the modern fact. Only  
once a stable community is in place, with formal rules resting on  
unspoken customs, can its accompanying way of knowing the world  
start to appear stable as well. Poovey presents each of her early  
modern participants in the making of the "modern fact" as falling short,  
in one way or another, of achieving such stability, and hence never  
quite securing trust in the facts they tried to generate. Neither her  
bookkeepers nor Mun really intended their "facts" to correspond  
transparently or comprehensively with "reality"; all that mattered for  
them was that their figures added up. And she presents other examples  
of people employing modern facts for premodern purposes, as when  
William Petty intended his political arithmetic to assist in the Hobbesian  
project of maintaining social order through kingly fiat.   
 
The main arguments of _A History of the Modern Fact_ come into  
focus in the chapters on Scottish moral philosophy and political  
economy. The subjects of these chapters first try to pin their hoped-for  
epistemological stability on divine design, before settling on the tools of  
disciplinary expertise. Poovey first traces the Scottish philosopher  
Francis Hutcheson's efforts to identify abstractions like "the human  
mind" at work in history, the reality of which he demonstrated not  
mainly by reference to historical evidence, but by internal coherence  
and the assumption that anything constructed by God must run like  
clockwork. The key figure in the move away from providential design,  
unsurprisingly, is David Hume, who drew attention to the problem of  
induction that providence left unanswered. Poovey portrays Hume as  
solving that problem to his satisfaction by asserting that even though all  
theories about society or nature can only be fictions, they are _useful_  
fictions which should not be abandoned just because they can never be  
fully proven. For Poovey the most important implication of this insight  
(although one which Hume shied away from) is that its success as a  
solution depends on the social authority of the expert whose job it is to  
invent theories, now that the expert can no longer appeal to the higher  
authority of God. Once experts achieve both the self-confidence to  
assert their systematic knowledge as "real" and the social status to  
enforce allegiance to those assertions, she claims, the modern fact is  
born.   
 
The most important of Hume's useful fictions, according to Poovey,  
was that of the market system, which Adam Smith famously adopted  
as the centerpiece of his _Wealth of Nations_. She describes Smith,  
like Hume, as being ambivalent about claiming the expert authority  
which lent weight to the thoroughly modern "fact". But she points to  
Smith's famous reference to unintended consequences as paving the  
way for the modern economist to make such claims. Even though  
Smith intended his "invisible hand" as a blow to "reason of state"  
theorists who assumed that rulers could fully predict and hence govern  
the behavior of their subjects, the notion of unintended consequences  
also further enhanced his status as an economic expert who could  
discern productive results, at least in hindsight, where others saw only  
self-interest. Poovey next turns from Smith to Malthus, who appealed  
to the economic fact of overpopulation to draw attention to a less  
optimistic unintended outcome: procreation leads to social disaster.  
Because this claim was even more clearly opposed to orthodox  
religious teaching than Smith's had been (and Poovey makes the same  
point about Ricardo's "dismal" theory of rent), the result was to cut  
economists off from any possible "providentialist" interpretation that  
might yet discover "reality" in their theories by reference to God's  
design.   
 
With this final problem, _A History of the Modern Fact_ comes to an  
end. Post-Ricardian economists are presented with a choice: try and  
patch back together the failed marriage between social science and  
natural theology, or go bravely forward, insisting ever more stridently  
that "facts" -- and not merely fictional "systems" -- do in fact prop up  
their theories. Poovey discusses J.R. McCulloch as a representative of  
post-Ricardian providentialism; and traces the development of the  
London Statistical Society as an example of the grim march forward.  
The march was grim, she suggests, because in their rush to base their  
social authority on the "facts" of political economy, they came face to  
face with the problem that neither Smith nor Ricardo had worried very  
much about "evidence" in the modern sense of empirical verification.  
Smith had relied on the rhetorical force of his striking claim that bad  
behavior yields good results, while Ricardo had staked his claim to  
expertise on internally-coherent mathematics; both, in short, had been  
happy to assume, along with Hume, that "fictions" could indeed be  
useful. The statisticians did not agree, so they simply collected facts  
and chastised anyone who did not do so as merely "literary". Since the  
statisticians still claimed to be doing social science, this move kept  
religious and social critics of political economy out of that domain,  
which in the long run allowed for further developments in economic  
theory (e.g. Jevons and Keynes). But, Poovey argues, this move  
certainly did not pave the way for any real solution to the problem of  
induction. As she concludes: "By stressing the incontrovertible nature  
of statistical 'facts' ... by way of contrast to the excesses and deceits  
associated with fiction and rhetoric, apologists for statistics were able  
to downplay the methodological problem of moving from whatever  
numbers were collected to general principles" (313-314).   
 
Poovey's mission in this book is, as she states, to open a dialogue  
about the origins and limitations of modern knowledge claims. In this  
sense it is primarily educative and synthetic; but not, as in a survey  
textbook, with the aim of filling undergraduates with relevant facts and  
socializing them to organize their thoughts in accordance with the  
norms of an academic discipline. Rather, the goal is to educate other  
academics to take notice of lively debates in fields outside their own,  
and the topics in each chapter are intended to illustrate how some of  
the lessons of these debates might be applied in practice. What makes  
the book's ungainly structure work (to the extent that it does work) is  
exactly what makes a good graduate program turn out good students:  
readers who have already thought about some of these issues are  
invited to pursue them in surprising directions. The other side of this is  
that many historians who have spent a career examining a single thread  
of this story in far more detail than Poovey could possibly have done  
will be tempted to split hairs, or to find little value added to their area of  
special expertise (those who are tempted to respond to the book in this  
way should at least not ignore the extensive footnotes, where Poovey  
provides running commentary on her use of secondary sources). And  
economic historians who have never been interested in the problem of  
induction (a sizeable demographic, if Poovey's claims are correct) will  
most likely not have the patience to follow her arguments through to the  
end. In other words, this book is not very well designed to teach old  
dogs new tricks.   
 
Poovey also uses her book to speak, more elliptically, to the ongoing  
academic debate over the merits of "postmodernism"; indeed, given  
her background as a literary critic, one way of reading this book is as  
an inquiry into the historical origins of postmodernism. At nearly every  
stage of her argument, she is careful to present examples of people  
proposing alternatives to the "modern fact" as a means of organizing  
knowledge. Hume, for instance, switched from treatises to essays after  
1757 in order to encourage a more open-ended, conversational  
approach to knowledge; Samuel Johnson's _Journey to the Western  
Islands of Scotland_ (1775) appears at the end of chapter five as a very  
early example of postcolonial critical theory, in which the Highlanders'  
agency is used to interrogate the limits of modern rationality. And  
Poovey concludes her book with the outright rejection of the "modern  
fact" by the Romantic poets Southey and Coleridge. These various  
efforts to get beyond a focus on grand theories and endless evidence,  
she argues, all anticipate to some extent the more general tendency of  
various "postmodern" writers today to "solve" the problem of the  
modern fact by rejecting it; by denying that knowledge needs to be  
about grand theories, and focusing instead on "micropolitics" or formal  
models. Although she doesn't explicitly say so, much of modern  
economic theory, at least dating back to Debreau, takes exactly this  
formalist approach to opting out of the problem of induction. As  
Poovey recognizes, though, and as the persistence of questions like "Is  
the New Economy Real?" suggests, the modern fact and its associated  
tensions are likely to remain with us for a long time to come.   
 
 
Tim Alborn is assistant professor of history at Lehman College in the  
City University of New York. He has published _Conceiving  
Companies: Joint-Stock Politics in Victorian England_ (Routledge,  
1998) and is working on a book about the social history of British life  
assurance.   
 
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