{"title":"Jacob Soll","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into the thought-provoking works of Jacob Soll, exploring intellectual history, the history of ideas, and the enduring relevance of classical thought. A compelling author for those seeking historical insights.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"reckoning-book-jacob-soll-9780718193621","title":"The Reckoning","description":"In The Reckoning, award-winning historian Jacob Soll shows how the use and misuse of financial bookkeeping has determined the fates of entire societies. Time and again, Soll reveals, good and honest accounting has been a tool to build successful companies, states and empires. Yet when it is neglected or falls into the wrong hands, accounting has contributed to cycles of destruction that continue to this day. Combining rigorous scholarship and fresh storytelling, The Reckoning traces the surprisingly powerful influence of accounting on financial and political stability, from the powerful Medici bank in the 14th century Italy to the 2008 financial crisis.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49551832711441,"sku":"GOR007814520","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49731218833681,"sku":"NGR9780718193621","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50094781792529,"sku":"CIN0718193628G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50759752122641,"sku":"GOR010092092","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53631085314321,"sku":"GOR009473108","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0718193628.jpg?v=1751419606"},{"product_id":"reckoning-book-jacob-soll-9781846146411","title":"The Reckoning","description":"In The Reckoning, award-winning historian Jacob Soll shows how the use and misuse of financial bookkeeping has determined the fates of entire societies. Time and again, Soll reveals, good and honest accounting has been a tool to build successful companies, states and empires. Yet when it is neglected or falls into the wrong hands, accounting has contributed to cycles of destruction that continue to this day. Combining rigorous scholarship and fresh storytelling, The Reckoning traces the surprisingly powerful influence of accounting on financial and political stability, from the powerful Medici bank in 14th century Italy to the 2008 financial crisis.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49570057027857,"sku":"GOR006201088","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53367901258001,"sku":"GOR008835107","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1846146410.jpg?v=1750930452"},{"product_id":"free-market-book-jacob-soll-9780465049707","title":"Free Market","description":"After two government bailouts of the American economy in less than twenty years, free market thought is due for serious reappraisal. Free Market: The History of an Idea shows how the idea became so powerful, why it succeeded, and why it has failed so spectacularly. In 1990, the G7 Countries enjoyed 70 percent of world GDP.  In the face of the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was supposed to be a story of the success of free markets. However, in the past thirty years, that number has dropped by half, and Asia has emerged as a major motor of world economic growth. Today, state-run China is the second biggest economy on earth, and tiny Singapore, with its state-owned companies, has become a new model of wealth creation. In other words, Milton Friedman's free market dogma, that only private companies can create wealth and that states hamper it, has not proved very clearly to be untrue.                 This book shows how we got to the current crisis of free market thought, and suggests how we can find our way out.  Contrary to popular free market narratives, early market theorists believed that states had an important role in building and maintaining free markets.  But in the eighteenth century, some free-market thinkers began insisting only pure free markets, without state intervention, could work.  A tradition of free-market ideological brittleness emerged, and it has led orthodox free market economics to some spectacular failures.                 It is a paradox that an economic theory rooted in the idea of competition, adaptation and evolution, has refused to follow its own precepts. This book shows that we need to go back to the origins of free market thought in order to understand its dynamism, as well as its inherent weaknesses, and to develop new economic concepts to face the staggering challenges of the twenty-first century.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49585535779089,"sku":"GOR012763120","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49743639249169,"sku":"NGR9780465049707","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50112174981393,"sku":"CIN0465049702G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51726372765969,"sku":"CIN0465049702VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0465049702.jpg?v=1751103690"},{"product_id":"information-master-book-jacob-soll-9780472034642","title":"The Information Master","description":"Jean-Baptiste Colbert saw governance of the state not as the inherent ability of the king, but as a form of mechanical mastery of subjects such as medieval legal history, physics, navigation, and the price lists of nails, sails, and gunpowder. In The Information Master, Jacob Soll shows how the legacy of Colbert’s encyclopedic tradition lies at the very center of the rise of the modern state.  This innovative book argues that Colbert's practice of collecting knowledge originated in Renaissance Italy, where merchants recognized the power to be gained from merging scholarship and trade. By connecting historical literatures—archives, libraries, merchant techniques, and humanist pedagogy—that have usually remained separate, Soll has created an imaginative and refreshing work.  \"\"Soll tells this story in wonderfully lucid prose, and with a great gift for concision. Colbert emerges from his pages not only as the patron saint of modern bureaucrats, but as a forceful—if somewhat repellent—personality, and as another of the great early modern figures who sought to gain unprecedented knowledge of, and mastery over, the material world.\"\"  —New Republic\"\"The Information Master makes a major contribution to our understanding of the uses of knowledge and the mechanisms by which knowledge was harnessed by the early modern state.\"\"  —Paul Nelles, Carleton UniversityJacob Soll is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University and the author of Publishing The Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism. He is a 2009 winner of a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.    Keywords: Information, State, Secrecy, Colbert, library science, archives, coup d’état, Louis XIV, Accounting, Finance","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49625371509009,"sku":"GOR013614852","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50977832993041,"sku":"GOR014157395","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0472034642.jpg?v=1751440941"},{"product_id":"the-reckoning-book-jacob-soll-9780465031528","title":"The The Reckoning","description":"Whether building a road or fighting a war, leaders from ancient Mesopotamia to the present have relied on financial accounting to track their state's assets and guide its policies. Basic accounting tools such as auditing and double-entry bookkeeping form the basis of modern capitalism and the nation-state. Yet our appreciation for accounting and its formative role throughout history remains minimal at best,and we remain ignorant at our peril. The 2008 financial crisis is only the most recent example of how poor or risky practices can shake, and even bring down, entire societies.In  The Reckoning , historian and MacArthur  Genius\" Award-winner Jacob Soll presents a sweeping history of accounting, drawing on a wealth of examples from over a millennia of human history to reveal how accounting has shaped kingdoms, empires, and entire civilizations. The Medici family of 15th century Florence used the double-entry method to win the loyalty of their clients, but eventually began to misrepresent their accounts, ultimately contributing to the economic decline of the Florentine state itself. In the 17th and 18th centuries, European rulers shunned honest accounting, understanding that accurate bookkeeping would constrain their spending and throw their legitimacy into question. And in fact, when King Louis XVI's director of finances published the crown's accounts in 1781, his revelations provoked a public outcry that helped to fuel the French Revolution. When transparent accounting finally took hold in the 19th Century, the practice helped England establish a global empire. But both inept and willfully misused accounting persist, as the catastrophic Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Recession of 2008 have made all too clear.A masterwork of economic and political history, and a radically new perspective on the recent past,  The Reckoning  compels us to see how accounting is an essential instrument of great institutions and nations,and one that, in our increasingly transparent and interconnected world, has never been more vital.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49654297002257,"sku":"GOR009346957","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50007246438673,"sku":"CIN0465031528A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50007246668049,"sku":"CIN0465031528G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51423582028049,"sku":"CIN0465031528VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52111672312081,"sku":"NIN9780465031528","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0465031528.jpg?v=1750782530"},{"product_id":"publishing-the-prince-book-jacob-soll-9780472033430","title":"Publishing The Prince","description":"As new ideas arose during the Enlightenment, many political thinkers published their own versions of popular early modern \"absolutist\" texts and transformed them into manuals of political resistance. As a result, these works never achieved a fixed and stable edition. Publishing The Prince illustrates how Abraham-Nicolas Amelot de La Houssaye created the most popular late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century version of Machiavelli's masterpiece. In the process of translating, Amelot also transformed the work, altering its form and meaning, and his ideas spread through later editions.  Revising the orthodox schema of the public sphere in which political authority shifted away from the crown with the rise of bourgeois civil society in the eighteenth century, Soll uses the example of Amelot to show for the first time how the public sphere in fact grew out of the learned and even royal libraries of erudite scholars and the bookshops of subversive, not-so-polite publicists of the republic of letters.  Jacob Soll is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University.  Cover art courtesy of Annenberg Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania Jacket Design: Stephanie Milanowski  \"Jacob Soll traces the origins of Enlightenment criticism to the practices of learned humanists and hard-pressed literary entrepreneurs. This learned and lively book is also a tour de force of historical research and interpretation.\" ---Anthony Grafton, author of Cardano's Cosmos and Bring Out Your Dead  \"Brilliant. How the printed page changed political philosophy into investigative reporting, and reason of state into the unmasking of power.\" ---J. G. A. Pocock, author of The Machiavellian Moment  \"Soll's path-breaking study is a 'must read' for all those interested in the history of political thought and early modern intellectual history.\" ---Barbara Shapiro, University of California Berkeley  \"Soll has done [Amelot] and his context justice, writing as he does with a clear, singular, and welcome voice.\"  ---Margaret C. 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