La Contametría como Expectativa: Métrica de las finanzas, número de la realidad y acción de la Sociedad

Abstract

This paper discusses the concept of ‘contametría’ (social accountics) ―which is one of the outstanding contributions to accounting made by the accounting thinker Rafael Franco-Ruiz, to whom the author pays his sincere tribute and “insuffi cient acknowledgement”, expressed in literary-musical clef, in order argue that “Franco’s wording does not sound like the violins of the Muses, but as a bass trombone tuned by Mars”, the ancient god of war. The concept, coined by Franco’s Contabilidad Integral (1989), is studied here in the context of what is proposed in the Third International Symposium on Accountics: “to present concepts of a more scientifi c knowledge in order to defi ne a social project of popular democracy to reconsider the core of the modern accounting as institutionalized by the dictatorship of Finance, and so being able to walk through the wide boardwalk of Society”. For establishing the question: what Accountics (‘contametría’) is?, the socio-historical method is employed by the author, following Castoriadis (2013, pp. 269-350), which stipulates that the social and the historical can only be understood as one and the same thing, so that Accountics will have only one position in the socio-political making of Accounting as a prudential science, conductive to the protection of society and public interest, in the light of a critical accounting thought that would dispute the establishment that has conceived financial accounting to protect private interests at the expense of the common good. The socio-historical issue is therefore what to do. Three working hypotheses are examined by the autor: a) accountics can reinforce the scientific nature of accounting as a social technology, to enhance its social efficiency; b) accountics could be established as a mode of thinking the social dimension of accounting in order to overcome “the epistemic siege of finances that deals the monetary as information and the social as interference, wealth as something perceivable and the social responsabilities as imperceivable”; c) accountics may be constituted the way to an accounting as a science-based social technology, with a human base, whose general and comprehensive framework are the prudential sciences, from the Aristotelian conception of humanities. The paper concludes that accountics needs to be an expectation of supply security for humanism. The key point tested is: what is accounting for? An answer is proposed: “not only for accountability, but rather to act with prudence”.