Michael Zakim, "Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

The University of Chicago Press Podcast · Aug 8, 2019 · 1h 15m

The clerk attended his desk and counter at the intersection of two great themes of modern historical experience: the development of a market economy and of a society governed from below. Who better illustrates the daily practice and production of this modernity than someone of no particular account assigned with overseeing all the new buying and selling? In Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made (U Chicago Press, 2018), Michael Zakim has written their story, a social history of capital that seeks to explain how the “bottom line” became a synonym for truth in an age shorn of…