Accounting, governing, and the historical construction of the “governing subject”

This chapter draws on Michel Foucault’s “bottom-up” conceptualising of “governmentality” to think the “governing subject” as initiator of, and passage point for, the “thinking and acting” of governing, from first beginnings around 3300 BCE in Mesopotamia and continuing down to today. It proposes that accounting as the historically earliest writing-form enableds the governing subject to become thinkable as enactor of forms of accounting-based, mathematically regularised, and centripetal coordination of humans and resources, and thus also rendering the “governed subject” thinkable as well. We identify two major subsequent transformations in our ways of thinking the governing subject. First, “governance” emerges from the 1600s as a term designating the “art of good governing” and so the “ethical governing subject”. Second, intensified forms of centripetal coordination and accountability are invented from around 1800, as what Foucault called “governmental management” and Alfred Chandler termed “administrative coordination”. We end by considering how one recent and distinctive version of such a subject, the governing subject of corporate governance, may draw on dimensions of each historical construct, in seeking to deliver a Corporate Governance both practicable and credible.