Historian Jacob Soll found the keys to the modern world in a king’s pockets. The data-driven wonders of Google, the bureaucratic beginnings (and financial entanglements) of modern governments, our obsession with organizing and classifying information—it was all there (well, sort of) in the pockets of that grandest of kings, Louis XIV of France. The Sun King kept love letters up his sleeves, but in his pockets were extraordinary account books with gold clasps and richly adorned frontispieces. “The most famous king of all time, and what did he keep in his pockets?” says Soll. “Account books.”
This was not what you expected from the king known for Versailles. The reason? “Louis XIV wanted to learn accounting with his minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert,” says Soll, a professor in the Department of History at Rutgers–Camden and author of a much-acclaimed book about Colbert, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System. “They sat there and learned accounting like merchants. Colbert made for Louis these little golden notebooks, little account books, which he kept in his pocket.”
Information systems—and accounting. They’re not the typical areas of inquiry for a historian, and Soll is not your typical historian. His über-project—essentially a massive, multibook history of the origins of the modern state and political liberty—explores these topics in “really weird ways, through histories of accounting, histories of libraries, and histories of political literature.” It’s a historical research project that’s ambitious, breathtakingly original, and not all that easy to convey. Even after receiving Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, Soll knew what it was like to have a bunch of academics staring at him with blank faces and saying, basically, “We don’t get it.”
Let’s just say that’s not likely to happen again. The reason? A so-called “genius grant” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. One night late last summer, Soll was walking in the rain when he got a phone call: he was one of 22 artists, intellectuals, and scientists selected for a 2011 MacArthur Fellowship, a five-year, $500,000 award bestowed for extraordinary originality and dedication to creative pursuits. He couldn’t believe it (“I thought it was a joke”). As he wrote in an email to the American Historical Association, “I am going to spend the money on wine and old-time learning! I want to hide out in Paris in old libraries, take notes, sleep on my desk, write books, and see odd movies in little theaters” … and let his mind wander. “History is about having time to think, meander, find strange connections, and follow improbable leads.”
Soll’s willingness to explore improbable leads—his fascination with topics like 17th-century accounting practices—have led to his insights about the connections between information management and the exercise of power in modern states. For Soll, history is alive, it is in the oft-ignored documents at archives in Florence and Paris, and it is a thrilling adventure of discovery. His research into Colbert uncovered an elaborate system (think Google, sans computers) for classifying and gaining access to every sort of information (methods for making rope, the drinking habits of dissidents), and you can still sense Soll’s thrill in the historical hunt.
“It was like an Indiana Jones thing,” he recalls, “where I pushed a rock, the wall comes down, and I am in this giant chamber.” As one reviewer put it, writing in the New Republic, “Ledgers, account books, and filing systems generally do not make for heroic drama or grand epic. Yet in the hands of Jacob Soll, these mundane objects become strangely mesmerizing.”
Now Soll has become a somewhat unlikely advocate of financial reforms, publishing an op-ed in the New York Times and discussing the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Glass-Steagall Act in the Philadelphia Inquirer. But what does this have to do with his earlier research, or even his current work, writing a book about accounting called The Reckoning: Lessons from the Tortured History of Finance and Political Accountability, Genoa 1340–Wall Street 1929? It all goes back to Colbert. “The day that Colbert dies, the account books stop, and [Louis XIV] wipes out the system,” says Soll. “He sees how to build the modern state, he realizes that it makes him accountable, he realizes that it can possibly expose him, and he wipes that out. Well, that sounds familiar: this is a problem that we still have. It’s right at the heart of Louis XIV, it’s right at the heart of Lehman Brothers, and it’s right at the heart of our problems right now.”
Not surprisingly, given the research required to yield Soll’s insights, he loves libraries. Soll plans to move to France for a year, with his family; the country will serve as a base to travel to archives and libraries in Ireland, Poland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and other locales. Just don’t think Jake is all work and no play. Consider this headline from the post-MacArthur wave of publicity: “Good food, wine a must for award-winning professor.” Yes, that’d be Soll. •
— Allan Hoffman