Pacioli’s Lens: Through a glass, darkly

Richard Macve

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: It has long been argued that double-entry bookkeeping (‘DEB’) was important for enabling capitalism’s development in the West and heralded the beginning of ‘modern accounting’. However, these claims remain contested so it is important to understand the history of DEB’s emergence about 700 years ago and its underlying rationale. Sangster (2018a) [Pacioli's Lens: God, Humanism, Euclid, and the Rhetoric of Double Entry. The Accounting Review, 93(2): 299-314] argues that, in the first printed manual on DEB in 1494, Pacioli presented a novel ‘axiomatic’ approach to explaining DEB that requires a corresponding ‘paradigmatic shift’ in our appreciation of his contribution. This paper challenges Sangster’s interpretation of Pacioli’s mathematical contribution and calls for deeper understanding of the historical development of DEB in the West by comparison with accounting developments in the East.

Keywords: Pacioli; double-entry bookkeeping (DEB); algebraic axioms; comparative international accounting history (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B11 C00 M40 P52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-12-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc, nep-his, nep-hpe and nep-mfd
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Accounting Historians Journal, 17, December, 2021, 49(1), pp. 83-92. ISSN: 0148-4184

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/112170/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:112170

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().