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Accounting is done by working and measuring values that it does not determine. It collects them from society. It discriminates some values (against others) based on a given objective.
A large part of the objectives that accounting manages today have to do with the socioeconomic change of the Enlightenment and its evolution in the following centuries. Oppositions now appear that enhance the criterion of progress against tradition.
Francisco Ortego (1833-1881) portrayed with incisive criticism the socioeconomic changes of his time, like this caricature published in the Gil Blas newspaper and today kept in the National Library of Spain.
Worth and banishment of tradition
The distinction between bourgeois/peasant, businessman/ worker, etc. has been shaping our Contemporary Age. Art, with its particular manifestations, has shown itself halfway between the consolidation of the Enlightenment ideal and social criticism.
Accounting, being an intermediate space between the spheres of technology and society, played a transcendental role. On the one hand, it allowed basic dynamics such as new and greater accumulations of capital. On the other, it allowed more complex processes thanks to its social heritage.