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Abstract
Developments in History Proper have by-passed accounting history. While sometimes open to occasional alarm calls such as this, mainstream history has carried-on regardless behind a defunct methodological shield. Historians have complacently paraded "interesting " data and evidence without consideration of its validity or relevance. Philosophical concerns have been methodically barred from consideration. Despite the Kuhnian Revolution, archival antiquarianism reigns supreme. This regimen survives in a North-Korean-like insularity, by combining a self-referential closure using Great Men of accounting with a refusal to engage a broader literature in social history. This paper redresses the balance in two ways: First, by using Kuhn's critique to show archivalist empiricism as incapable of proving a paradigm's truth, and revealing how easily the latter may succumb to popularist euphoria and ideologies. Second, by sketching a Post-Kuhnian panorama in terms of a Non-Eurocentric, social, gendered, environmental, public interest and labour orientation. Ignoring such possibilities condemns accounting history to more soldiering under impoverished Archivalism.
Keywords: Archivalism, Kuhn, critical, empiricist, philosophy.
Introduction
Accounting history's resolute adherence to empiricist, archival, and otherwise antiquarian epistemes, has prevailed notwithstanding seismic changes in the broader fields of history and philosophy. Accounting history has avoided engaging this wider literature and maintained a methodological naivety, by excessive internal self-referencing, an over-dependence on influential editorial oracles, and a revivalist preoccupation with "The Great Men" of accounting. By quarantining accounting history from the contagion of serious debates in History Proper, accounting has forfeited opportunities to speak authoritatively from the past about problems that beset accounting in the present.
This paper alerts the reader to the significance of changes underway on the larger historical canvass, and indicates "what-might-have-been" for accounting history. First, however, we recount the Kuhnian1 broadside delivered to the philosophical underpinnings of Archivalism (Empiricism). This Kuhnian critique was a somewhat orthodox philosophical attack on empiricist research (Kuhn, 1962, 1970).
The Post-Kuhnian critique opened the floodgates to a broader shift in Philosophy, from Popperian Intersubjectivism to Historical Materialism (Ravetz, 1973, 1984; Ross, 1990). The Post-Kuhnian assault contended that Archivalist Empiricism masked a latent normative, political agenda that precluded some histories, and promoted others. Specifically, progressive forms of accounting history have taken a back-seat to conservative renditions of the subject. Post-Kuhnianism shows that partisanship in history is inescapable, and that...