Americanism and financial accounting theory – Part 1: Was America born capitalist?

Abstract

This paper (Part 1), and two related papers (Part 2: The ‘modern business enterprise’, America's transition to capitalism, and the genesis of management accounting; and Part 3: Adam Smith, the rise and fall of socialism, and Irving Fisher's theory of accounting), explore historical links between American ideology and Irving Fisher's theory of accounting. They explain Fisher's theory as the product of America's exceptional transition to capitalism and the ideological consequences. Part 1 uses Marx's theories of the transition in England, of colonisation, and of ideology, to construct an accounting history model of America's transition to capitalism that identifies the dominant social relations of production and calculative mentalities, and uses them to predict the accounting signatures and political ideologies we should observe if the theories are correct. Parts 1 and 2 test the model. Part 3 explores the ideological consequences of America's transition, for America and financial accounting. Scholars generally assume that America was ‘born capitalist’; historians argue it became capitalist sometime from the late 18th to early 19th centuries. The model, however, identifies early farmers as ‘simple commodity producers’ who, it predicts, kept only single entry accounts of debt, and had a ‘producer’ ideology of ‘equality’ and ‘freedom’. It identifies planters and manufacturers as ‘semi-capitalists’ – part merchant capitalist and part simple commodity producer – who it predicts calculated ‘profit’ as consumable surplus, pursued the ‘simple rate of profit’, controlled only prime costs, and had an ideology of ‘individualism’ that combined the producers’ ideology with the merchants’ ‘laissez-faire’. Part 1 re-examines evidence from accounts to around the mid-19th century, which confirms that farmers were not capitalists and that even the most advanced merchants, manufacturers and planters were semi-capitalists. Part 2 searches for capitalists in the second half of the 19th century. It re-examines evidence from the accounts of the Boston Associates who historians have seen as ‘proto-industrial capitalists’; from the railroads heralded by Chandler as the beginning of ‘managerial capitalism’; and from ‘entrepreneurial capitalists’ like Andrew Carnegie who created the large corporations that conquered America from the 1880s. Their financial accounts and cost management systems reveal the same semi-capitalist mentality found in the early 19th century. Re-examination of the ‘costing renaissance’ in the 1890s and evidence from the DuPont Powder Company and General Motors from 1900 to 1920, suggests that only from around 1900, after escalating conflict between ‘capital and labour’, did the capitalist mentality appear in new management accounting systems focused on ‘return on investment’. Part 3 shows that the accounting evidence closely correlates with the history of American political ideology. It argues that Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations dominated American politics until the late 19th century because it theorised a nation of simple commodity producers and semi-capitalists. It explains the delay in America's transition compared to Britain's, and the decline in the popularity of laissez-faire from the 1880s, as consequences of this exceptional starting point. ‘Big business’ capitalism created an ideological problem for America's ruling elite, particularly the threat of socialism from around 1900 to 1920. Part 3 argues that Fisher's neoclassical theory of ‘capital’ and ‘income’, designed as a critique of Marx, responded to this problem and played an important role in undermining middle class support for socialism. Fisher said he based his theory on accounting practice, particularly double entry bookkeeping, but Part 3 shows he did not use or understand it, which divorced his accounting from reality. American history's legacy to the world, the papers therefore conclude, is a pathological theory of financial accounting.