摘要：Most often, accounting professionals refer to its history to justify its status as a
university discipline in terms of seniority, of accounting “veneration”. But the history of accounting is not a
mere curiosity or an intellectual exercise. Generally speaking, since antiquity, history was regarded as being
also practical apart from its theoretical dimension. In this sense, Aristotle said that "if you want to
understand something, see how it arose and how it has developed". Classically, there is a dichotomy between
the conventional approach to history and the one characteristic to social sciences. From this point of view, it
is said that a historian studies the past, while the social sciences researchers will use the past to understand
the present.
