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Paolo Quattrone (@PaoloQuattrone) joins Money on the Left to discuss the metaphysics of accounting and the significance of accounting\u2019s repressed history for political economy today. Professor of Accounting, Governance & Society at The University of Manchester, Quattrone insists that, while often seen as a positivist and merely technical skill for recording extant data, accounting in truth represents a rhetorical and quite generative engagement with the \u201cmystery of value.\u201d This mystery, Quattrone reminds us, informs nearly all aspects of collective life. Genealogy is central to Quattrone\u2019s work and, in our conversation, we explore how numbers, figures, and visual arrangements used in contemporary accounting trace complex and often surprising lineages that have a lot to teach us about accounting\u2019s still untapped possibilities. Along the way, we touch upon two of Quattrone\u2019s most important case studies. First, we delve into the Jesuit order\u2019s rich contributions to early-modern accounting, including its development of double-entry bookkeeping. Then, we turn to the more recent history of \u201cI.R.I.,\u201d the Italian \u201cInstitute for Industrial Construction\u201d which, even as it served as administrative arm of the Marshall Plan, underwrote the midcentury period of prosperity known as la dolce vita by precisely rejecting the ideology of \u201cprofit maximization\u201d promulgated by The United States. We conclude, finally, by rethinking money\u2019s futurity through Quattrone\u2019s approach to accounting. If spending tomorrow is never flatly predicated upon yesterday\u2019s inert data in the form of receipts or revenue, we suggest, then it instead derives from mobilizing accounting practices in the present to create new credit and debt relations \u201cendogenously\u201d in response to shifting circumstances.

You can find Quattrone's publications here: https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/researchers/paolo-quattrone(4b8a4f45-fecc-422c-8991-8bfc9f1e4efd)/publications.html

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com