Confession and Bookkeeping: The Religious, Moral, and Rhetorical Roots of Modern Accounting. By James Aho. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Pp. xx+131.

Abstract

Book Reviews Confession and Bookkeeping: The Religious, Moral, and Rhetorical Roots of Modern Accounting. By James Aho. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Pp. xx⫹131. Bill Maurer University of California, Irvine Confession and Bookkeeping is an insightful and quirky little book that significantly expands the scholarly discussion on double-entry bookkeep- ing, long a topic of fascination to historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and accounting scholars. Revisiting the classic debate between Sombart and Weber on religion and the rise of capitalism, James Aho argues per- suasively that Weber got it wrong, and backs up his argument with a telling history of the transformation of the Catholic sacrament of penance. In this age of Enron, WorldCom, and Halliburton, where bookkeeping and scandal seem to go hand in hand, the book is also a plea for a more scrupulous, indeed, reverent, accounting. The argument, in brief, is that the innovation of sacramental confession in the Catholic church provided a model for business accounting as well as a method for merchants to demonstrate their moral purity, or at the very least the agony with which they exposed themselves to self-scrutiny. They did not use double-entry bookkeeping, pace Weber, to plan their business activities, but rather to account for the state of their souls and justify their activities to church fathers. For Weber, the Catholic rite of penance inhibited material acquisition and thus business, for it inspired an inner asceticism. The problem is that Weber’s thesis ignores the in- convenient fact that double-entry bookkeeping actually arose in medieval Catholic Italy. Aho shows that it also arose in tight conversation with the rite of penance itself. Contra Weber’s conviction that, during the Middle Ages, “a business career was possible only for those who were lax in their ethical standards” (quoted on p. 49), Aho demonstrates that the medieval businessperson was racked with anxiety about the ethical standing of their activities and the moral reckoning they would face on judgment day. The key to Aho’s argument is the transformation of confession: the shift from canonical penance—the conferral of a special status on the penitent for a period of time during a ritual to be observed only once a lifetime (if that)—to part of papal law that required the regular and repeated divulgence of one’s sins to a priest in a quasi-therapeutic setting. Sacramental penance did not become a requirement until the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which adopted the Celtic rite and made it com- pulsory. Originally decried by church fathers interested in preserving their authority (penitential handbooks were ordered burned in 829 CE), private penance spread like wildfire, creating an “epidemic of scrupulosity” (p. 25), indeed, an almost neurotic fixation on it. Possibly derived from Hindu practices and Greek medicine—the cura animarum—private penance