Accounting for war

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which accounting has helped to rationalize and normalize violence and how this has contributed to the acceleration and expansion of war. It is argued that accounting is a product of the “social imaginary” of modernity which projects a brutal attitude towards others by instrumentalizing relationships. Accounting’s reliance on instrumental rationality and economic efficiency provides the ideological justification for destroying the environment and others. Accounting’s role in perpetrating war and warlike behaviors is demonstrated in relation to our war with the environment, the expansionistic logic of capitalism, dehumanization and distance, globalization, the silent war of economic sanctions and the extent to which war is good for business.

Keywords:

• Accounting
• War
• Modernity
• Social imaginary

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Michael Coyne, Crawford Spence, Christine Cooper, David Cooper, participants at the 2006 American Accounting Association Mid-Atlantic Region Meeting, Pittsburgh, PA and participants at the Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Accounting Conference, Cardiff, Wales, 2006 for helpful comments.

Notes

1 Of course, other historical trajectories are possible and in this regard it is interesting to observe that in social theory these narratives have come under attack by postmodern positions that deny that the age of Grand Narratives are over, that we cannot believe in them anymore. As Taylor observes in response ‘But, their demise is the more obviously exaggerated in that the postmodern writers themselves are making use of the same trope in declaring the reign of narrative ended: ONCE we were into grand stories, but NOW we have realized their emptiness and we proceed to the next stage’ (Taylor, 2007, p. 717).

2 By social imaginary we mean the way that we collectively imagine, even pre-theoretically our social life in the contemporary Western world (see Taylor, 2007, p. 146).

3 From the letter to Gibieuf, 19th January, 1642, which comes from the mediational passage ‘You inquire about the principle by which I claim to know that the idea I have of something is not an idea made inadequate by the abstraction of my intellect. I derive this knowledge purely from my own thought or consciousness. I am certain that I can have no knowledge of what is outside me except by means of the ideas I have within me; and so I take great care not to relate my judgements immediately to things in the world, and not to attribute to such things anything positive which I do not first perceive in the ideas of them (Kenny, 1970, p. 123).