Michael Zakim's "Accounting for Capitalism"

Michael Zakim teaches history at Tel Aviv University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made, and reported the following:

The ninety-ninth page of Accounting for Capitalism is devoted to a pictorial parable that appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1854, depicting the “two paths in life” (earnestness versus dissipation) faced by everyone who assumes exclusive sovereignty over their fate. The Harper’s caricature is part of my book’s third chapter, which contends that the “self-made man,” a distinctly modern cultural hero born of the industrial century, constituted one of the great production projects of the new capitalist economy, namely, the production of oneself. Such “individualism” (a neologism of the times) marked a radical departure from republican tradition in America, which had rested on the moral economy of patriarchal households.

The individual’s transformation into an “ism” was closely related to another etymological event of equal revolutionary significance: capital’s transformation into “capitalism,” which was revealing of the growing relevance of truck and barter to the whole of social experience. The rise of capital to such moral and material status begat a class of “merchant clerks” assigned with administering the industrial century’s second great production project, production of the market. Indeed, the clerk personified both of these developments. Moving from farm to metropolis, from homestead to boarding house, and from growing things to selling them, he not only kept the accounts, delivered bills, distributed samples, paid import duties, figured interest charges, and copied out a constant stream of correspondence, but conceived of his own life as the subject of the same gestalt of utility, enterprise, and calculation. This turned him into an unlikely icon of the age, as well as the anti-hero of Herman Melville’s famous story of the Wall-Street scrivener, “Bartleby,” published a year before the Harper’s pictorial. Negotiable, impermanent, unhinged from the soil, and carried along by commerce’s tides of boom and bust, the clerk did not just produce the market, in other words. He was himself one of its products, the pioneer of what we so casually call today “human capital.”

Learn more about Accounting for Capitalism at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue