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’.

       Historian Jacob Stoll develops the case that double entry ranks with gravitation, calculus and relativity, as he uses the history of accounting to provide insight into business and political history.  Accounting has Sumerian origins, but only the emergence  of tractable  numbering systems – imagine financial statements with Roman numerals and no zero – made effective bookkeeping possible.  The invention of double-entry accounting by Genoese merchants allowed the evolution of modern finance.

       Stoll sees accounting as the key to accountability.  Louis XIV discontinued  Colbert’s elaborate bookkeeping system  because the monarch  could not bear the evidence of his own extravagance. Stoll draws an analogy with the  fictitious accounts provided by modern Sun Kings in the first decade of the new millennium.  Public accounting is a powerful antidote to autocracy, Stoll argues – Hitler dismissed most of the accounting staff of the Reichsbahn.

       Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister protests that ‘you begin by the form as if it were the matter; traders commonly, in their additions and borrowings, forget what is the net result of life’  To  which his interlocutor responds that ‘form and matter are in this case one’.   We cannot live without finance and accountability:  but nor can we live only for them.