Reviewed by Bernard Colasse Université de Paris — Dauphine

A French reader can only greet with enthusiasm R. P. Brief’s initiative in persuading an American publisher not only to reissue the Léautey and Guilbault treatise on accounting (first edition, 1889) but to republish it in the original French. No publishing house in Paris, unfortunately, would have taken such a risk.

The works of Léautey and Guilbault, who published both jointly and individually, enjoyed widespread success in Belgium and France at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. La Science des Comptes knew no fewer than twenty-seven editions! It is, in fact, the twenty-seventh edition which has been reprinted by Arno Press.
La Science des Comptes consists of three major sections.

In the first section the authors define a certain number of terms, including accounting itself, and present the three components of accounting which they deem essential: the ledger, the journal, and the balance.

In the second section they propose their own theory of accounting, a new means of classifying accounts. They isolate four classes of accounts (pages 119-123).

class 1: A Prior Capital Accounts
class 2: B Real Accounts
class 3: C Personal Accounts
class 4: X Profit and Loss Accounts

The authors strive to show convincingly that this classification is the most logical approach for calculating operating income. The transactions which affect the class B and C accounts determine income, which is first recorded in the class X accounts and then again in the class A accounts. Léautey and Guilbault make use of formulae and symbols to support their arguments. This has led French historians to link them to the Mathematical School.

In the third section, which comprises more than half of the work, there is an exhaustive treatment of all operations likely to affect the different classes of accounts.

It is however the treatise’s philosophy, rather than its accounting theory, that is most likely to interest the student of accounting history.
Although their writings were certainly influential among their own contemporaries, Léautey and Guilbault do not seem, in retrospect, to have introduced significant changes into accounting concepts. They were scarcely the first, for example, to advocate the “dual personality” theory (which distinguishes between two separate legal entities, or “persons;” the owner and the business) or to support the rule “qui reçoit doit, qui donne a” (“debit him that receives, credit him that gives”). (pp. 34-35)

On the other hand, it is surprising to see to what extent Léautey’s and Guilbault’s works are infused with Positivism, that philosophical doctrine of which the founding father was Auguste Comte (1798-1857). This assertion deserves greater elaboration, but we must limit the discussion here to a very brief indication of positivist elements in Léautey’s and Guilbault’s approach.

First of all, the authors want to make of accounting a true science or, more specifically, a branch of mathematics. Accounting, in other words, should rise to the “third state” of intellectual activity, the “positive state,” (that state which, as defined by Auguste Comte, comes after the theological and metaphysical states): “Accounting, a branch of mathematics, is the science of rational coordination of accounts.” (p. 17)

The authors are further concerned to create, through accounting procedures, a new order in the administration of private and public organizations and to work toward the advent of Auguste Comte’s “organic society” (“société organique”).

In Comte’s view, all societies experience periods of disorder: “Sociétés critiques” (“societies in crisis”) and periods of order (“organic societies”). The return to order following a period of disorder does not mean the restoration of the old order. It consists, rather, of the institution of a higher order, an advance resulting from changes in modes of thinking. Accounting, having been elevated by Léautey and Guilbault to the rank of a science, could now contribute to the emergence of a new social order.

The third positivist feature of Léautey’s and Guilbault’s work is their messianism. In order for accounting to accomplish its social mission, it must be foreign to no sector of activity, economic or otherwise, and be practiced by members of all social categories: “capitalat,” “salariat,” “proletariat,” (the employer-owners, the white collar employees, and the propertyless wage-workers).

Ultimately, rereading The Science of Accounting teaches us above all—if we did not know it already—that accounting principles and practices do not evolve autonomously but that they are part of a general evolution of ideas. Some of our more important manuals today probably owe as much to Structuralism or Existentialism as Léautey and Guilbault’s treatise did to Positivism.