The 1771 and 1824 reforms of the University of Ferrara: A Foucauldian analysis of papal interests

Abstract

While universities have fulfilled a central role in education, their multifaceted amalgamations of economic, political, judicial and epistemological relations of power have been paid little attention by accounting historians. This study examines the role of accounting in the power/control relationship between the Papal State and an eighteenth–nineteenth century Italian University using a Foucauldian episteme of disciplinary power and governmentality. Our findings show a separation of accounting from the exercise of education or the reproduction of a meticulous grammatocentric and panoptic system for human accountability (Hoskin and Macve, 1986, 1988; Carmona et al., 1997). However, this work reveals how supervised education gradually became a more refined tool of Christian morality, along with papal control of the institution and its expenses.