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Modern political culture features a deep-seated faith in the power
of numbers to find answers, settle disputes, and explain how the
world works. Whether evaluating economic trends, measuring the
success of institutions, or divining public opinion, we are told
that numbers don’t lie. But numbers have not always been so
revered. Calculated Values traces how numbers first gained
widespread public authority in one nation, Great Britain. Into the
seventeenth century, numerical reasoning bore no special weight in
political life. Complex calculations were often regarded with
suspicion, seen as the narrow province of navigators, bookkeepers,
and astrologers, not gentlemen. This changed in the decades
following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Though Britons’ new
quantitative enthusiasm coincided with major advances in natural
science, financial capitalism, and the power of the British state,
it was no automatic consequence of those developments, William
Deringer argues. Rather, it was a product of politics—ugly,
antagonistic, partisan politics. From parliamentary debates to
cheap pamphlets, disputes over taxes, trade, and national debt were
increasingly conducted through calculations. Some of the era’s
most pivotal political moments, like the 1707 Union of England and
Scotland and the 1720 South Sea Bubble, turned upon calculative
conflicts. As Britons learned to fight by the numbers, they came to
believe, as one calculator wrote in 1727, that “facts and figures
are the most stubborn evidences.” Yet the authority of numbers
arose not from efforts to find objective truths that transcended
politics, but from the turmoil of politics itself.
The historical relationship between science and capitalism has long
stood as a central question in science studies, at least since its
foundations in the 1930s. Taking inspiration from the recent surge
of scholarly interest in the "history of capitalism," as well as
from renewed attention to political economy by historians of
science and technology, this Osiris volume revisits this classic
quandary, foregrounding the entanglements between these two
powerful and unruly historical forces and tracing the diverse ways
they mutually shaped each other. Key attention is paid to the
practices of knowledge work that enable both scientific and
capitalistic action and to the diversity of global sites and
circuits in which science/capitalism have been performed. The
assembled papers excavate an array of tangled nodes at the
science/capitalism nexus, spanning from the seventeenth century to
the twenty-first, from Nevada to Central Asia to Japan, from
microbiology to industrial psychology to public health.
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