/lit/ - Literature

>Werner Sombart observed that if he were pressed to give a date for the inauguration of capitalism, he would say that the publication of Leonardo Pisano's 'Liber Abbaci,' the first popular treatise on arithmetic, would be that date, A.D. 1202. Any such single starting point would be challengeable; one might cite a score of equally critical moments. But one of the most important traits of the new capitalism, its concentration on abstract quantities, was indeed furthered by such instruction. The new form of universal accountancy isolated from the tissue of events just those factors that could be judged on an impersonal, quantitative scale. Counting numbers began here and in the end numbers alone counted. This was ultimately a more significant contribution of capitalism than any of the actual goods the merchant bought and sold. For only when the habit of using mathematical abstractions became ingrained in a dominant part of the community could the physical sciences resume the place they had first occupied in the great trading cities of Ionic Greece. Again, this connection was not accidental.

>Wherever the capitalist spirit took hold, people became familiar with the abstractions of the counting house: timing, weighing, and measuring, in ever more exact amounts, became the mark of this whole regime. The change was not spontaneous, but the result of deliberate intention and persistent indoctrination. From the thirteenth century on, the grammar school, with its fundamental courses in reading, writing, and arithmetic, inculcated the elementary symbols for long-distance buying and selling, for making contracts, for book-keeping and bill-rendering. The need for reliable information and careful forecasts, in order to trade in commodities not seen till delivered, furthered the appreciation of quantitative appraisals in every department: not merely just weights and measures, but accurate astronomical observations in navigation.

>The impersonal, bureaucratic order of the counting house vied with monastic and military order in laying the foundations for the inflexible discipline and impersonal regularity that has now gradually extended itself to every aspect of institutional life in Western civilization. This order has been smoothly translated into automatic machines and computers, even more incapable of exercising humane judgement and discretion than a trained clerk. The new bureaucracy devoted to managerial organization and coordination again became a necessary adjunct to all large-scale, long distance enterprises: book-keeping and record-keeping set the pace, in standardized uniformity, for all the other parts of the machine. The failure to reckon with this mathematical aspect of mechanization, as a prelude to industrial inventions, has resulted in a warped and one-sided picture of modern technics.