Cameralism and the Enlightenment

Happiness, Governance and Reform in Transnational Perspective

Ere Nokkala, Nicholas B. Miller, Ere Nokkala, Nicholas B. Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367360511
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000762037
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Histoire économique

Cameralism and the Enlightenment reassesses the relationship between two key phenomena of European history often disconnected from each other. It builds on recent insights from global history, transnational history and Enlightenment studies to reflect on the dynamic interactions of cameralism, an early modern set of practices and discourses of statecraft prominent in central Europe, with the broader political, intellectual and cultural developments of the Enlightenment world. Through contributions from prominent scholars across the field of Enlightenment studies, the volume analyzes eighteenth-century cameralist authors' engagements with commerce, colonialism and natural law. Challenging the caricature of cameralism as a German, land-locked version of mercantilism, the volume reframes its importance for scholars of the Enlightenment broadly conceived.

This volume goes beyond the typical focus on Britain and France in studies of political economy, widening perspectives about the dissemination of ideas of governance, happiness and reform to focus on multidirectional exchanges across continental Europe and beyond during the eighteenth century. Emphasizing the practice of theory, it proposes the study of the porosity of ideas in their exchange, transmission and mediation between spaces and discourses as a key dimension of cultural and intellectual history.

1
Introduction

Ere Nokkala and Nicholas B. Miller

Eighteenth-century practices and discourses of statecraft known as cameralism have not often been studied in connection with the transnational philosophical phenomenon of the European Enlightenment. Defined by an Anglo-French perspective, classic scholarship portrayed the ideas of French physiocrats and British political economists as constitutive of an Enlightenment approach to questions of state and economy. Other viewpoints, particularly those of officials actually working for eighteenth-century European states, were judged as either beyond Enlightenment thought, or continuing in traditions that predated the Enlightenment. But what do we do with the fact that these individuals—named in the scholarship as cameralists—lived lives beyond the princely chamber? Seventeenth-century cameralists, advisors of rulers in the German princely states, were mainly interested in questions of unlimited monarchy and administration. Their arguments reflected a discourse of allegiance, crafted as they were in a political setting defined by princely ascendancy. However, over the course of the eighteenth century, they entered new domains, namely universities, and turned cameralism into an academic and theoretical discipline that took diverse and changing forms.

Conceiving statecraft as an art of secrecy, the state built the walls of the princely chambers and universities of central Europe solid and thick; but we propose in this volume that they were hardly thick enough to drown out the wider world of ideas that swept Europe and beyond over the course of the eighteenth century. Building upon recent methodological shifts in Enlightenment studies and intellectual history, this volume develops a cultural and intellectual history of cameralism that goes beyond the supposed tension between ideas and practice stipulated in the existing literature.¹ Our starting point is a reconceptualization of the terms in question, borne from a position of scepticism towards the unity of the labels of “cameralists” and “cameralism”. Cameralism here is not defined as a stable category of analysis; rather, we use it as a signifier for a field of thinkers situated within the dynamic intellectual milieu of the European Enlightenment.

In this volume, we approach cameralism as a political-economic field in dynamic interaction with the historiographical concept of Enlightenment. Let us unpack this complex manoeuvre. Cameralism can be seen doubly as a set of practices and ideas relating to state administration during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, centred in though by no means exclusive to central Europe, which underpinned an emergent university discipline with similar geographical configurations during the eighteenth century. Particularly in the eighteenth century, practitioners such as Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi, Joseph von Sonnenfels and Johann Beckmann explicitly named themselves as cameralists. Enlightenment is approached here, in the sense that defines the burgeoning field of Enlightenment studies, as a heuristic, rather than an actor category. As suggested by Hans-Erich Bödeker and more recently Elisabeth Décultot, we take it as an epochal historiographical concept defined by “certain hermeneutical prerequisites” emergent from a reading of Enlightenment as a set of medial practices, intellectual frameworks and processes of communication that characterised the long eighteenth century.² To study the conjuncture of cameralism and Enlightenment is far more than to study the disciplinisation of cameralism at universities in the eighteenth century, or late rather than early cameralism. Rather, we aim here to reconfigure cameralism as an historical unit of inquiry. Instead of a tightly bounded domain of unchanging ideas, we approach cameralism as a porous field open to the influence of alternate and competing intellectual strains, impulses and traditions.

Our approach is a simultaneously methodological and thematic reconsideration of boundaries and units of analysis in intellectual history. We theorise discourse here as a complex of ideas, rather than as a coherent doctrine, as Lars Magnusson proposed in his recent study on mercantilism.³ Our intervention is one of historicisation, approaching the subject of cameralism as a changing rather than static unit of analysis. Together with this, we suggest a study of discourse conducted at the level of individual intellectual agents who were cameralists only alongside other professional, confessional and personal commitments. By homing in on the role of individual agents and local settings in the transnational dissemination of cameralist thinking during the eighteenth century, we address long-standing gaps in the historiography, including the vogue of university chairs in the cameral sciences beyond Germany and the systematic translation of cameralist texts across Europe. Rather than approaching the production of local valences of cameralism as a process of dilution, we instead demonstrate how the blending of cameralism with other strains of thought was constitutive of a process of its adaptation in different academic, political and administrative environments.

1. Point of Departure

Christian Wolff in Halle, Joseph von Sonnenfels in Vienna, J. H. G. von Justi in Vienna and Göttingen, are only the three best known among a tribe of authoritarian rationalists whose ideas and ideals all seem cast from the same mould or copied from one another. Their aims were ambitious, though, and from their point of view, realistic: they sought to produce and increase happiness by reasonable enactments. Their political theory constitutes an escape from politics into management, the tactful evasion of a challenge to real power that would have been hopeless. Without a historical, social, or educational basis for liberalism, liberalism seemed to them Utopia, paternalism the only way to general betterment.⁴

Peter Gay, one of the doyens of Enlightenment studies, put forth his classic interpretation of cameralism in 1969. His quote exemplifies several problems in how cameralism has been, and often still is, studied in its relation to the Enlightenment. First, cameralism is pronounced to be a bounded field of ideas defined by negligible diversity or originality, with cameralists dismissed as mass-produced copycats. Second, cameralists are judged as seeking “an escape from politics to management”, alluding to the older interpretative stereotype of the “apolitical” German Enlightenment and the assumption that absence of liberalism denoted lack of political engagement. This line of scholarship takes liberalism, and above all, Atlantic liberalism, as the yardstick against which everything else can be measured.⁵

Gay’s account would not be much of a problem were it not still being reproduced. Many of his points continue to be repeated without hesitation. Cameralism is variously essentialised as German, paternalistic and absolutist, and approached as merely an apolitical theory of management of princely domains.⁶ Analytically, cameralism is simultaneously associated with Prussian or Austrian absolutism for seventeenth-century contexts and described as the legitimising discipline of the centralising efforts of Friedrich II of Prussia and Maria Theresa of Austria against the backdrop of Enlightenment.⁷ Interpretively, this account is often offered in order to indicate how fundamentally different cameralism was from a so-called “Western political economy” which advocated individual agents to pursue happiness as they themselves conceived it. That is, camera-lism was long spatially restricted to German-speaking Europe, a region defined as an exceptional part of Europe.

Taking cameralism as a German Sonderweg of political economy parallels the larger problem of the notion of a Sonderweg in defining a specifically German Enlightenment, in contrast to the transnational approach of studying Enlightenment in Germany. Sonderweg, a historiographical thesis dating from the nineteenth century that emphasised Germany’s “special path” in its transition to modernity, is today largely considered outdated, though legacies of its analytical power remain in the way that German particularities are historically studied. We take issue with the implication that cameralism was a typically apolitical German tactic of governance, or simply as John Gagliardo would have it, a “German brand of mercantilism” focused on fiscal approaches to social-political reform.⁸ The old narrative that eighteenth-century German thinkers were apolitical, preoccupied with literary aesthetics or government administration, conveniently dovetails with the judgement that cameralism and Enlightenment were circumscribed territories, one “practical” and the other “literary”. This demarcation is untenable at the level of studying individual cameralists, who straddled worlds of administration and letters.

Going beyond Sonderweg, we argue that cameralism must be studied as part of what Steven L Kaplan and Sophus Reinert have recently termed the “economic turn” that took place in diverse ways across Europe and farther afield during the Enlightenment.⁹ In this volume, we are not revisiting the old question of whether cameralism was a German variation of mercantilism as a set discourse. Rather, we consider how cameralism acted as a lens in the transition of political economy in specific intellectual contexts during the Enlightenment. In John Robertson’s influential interpretation, “the core of the Enlightenment’s contribution to Western thought” is “political economy as the prospect of human betterment in this world rather than the next, in the present over the past”.¹⁰

Many scholars have tracked the emergence of enlightened political economy in the mercantile literature of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and how, during the Enlightenment, political economy transformed by engaging natural law and a new conviction of the capacity of human beings to improve their conditions.¹¹ Enlightened political economy was not an entirely “new science of economics”, as suggested by Jonathan Israel.¹² What was new was a conception of progress as doubly founded on the “discovery” or “invention” of a future that could be imagined as something fundamentally different than the past or present.¹³ Below, we demonstrate how cameralism, rather than a static, unchanging discourse, was affected by this broader politicisation of society.

We thus also problematise the classic tendency to interpret cameralism through the framework of Enlightened Absolutism, which, despite the modifying adjective, often situated it beyond Enlightenment, as Enlightenment in these studies was often anachronistically read as a breeding ground of liberalism. In this line of thought, with its liberal blinders that saw the only politics worthy of the name as those of liberal democracies, cameralist thinkers were seen as non-political.¹⁴ More recently, there has been an opposite problem, with some going so far as to occlude the difference between both concepts, naming cameralism as “an Enlightenment philosophical doctrine” of particular potency in the Habsburg Realms.¹⁵

By systematically reflecting on the relationship between cameralism and the Enlightenment, this volume goes beyond paradigms of Sonderweg and German particularism to propose new directions for the study of political ideas in action. Further, by exploring how eighteenth-century cameralist thinkers engaged with broader Enlightenment inquiries about commerce, global trade and colonialism, we evidence how cameralists and German-thinkers more broadly were intellectually enmeshed in the expansion of global horizons well documented for European Atlantic contexts.

2. Interventions

Our study is born from revived interest in the study of cameralism, particularly in Anglophone and Francophone contexts, following Michel Foucault’s consideration of the topic during his lectures on governmentality in Paris and Berkeley in the late 1970s.¹⁶ Foucault identified cameralist theoreticians, particularly Justi, as crucial agents in the development of what he termed “governmental thought”, or “the new form of governmentality born in the eighteenth century” from the transformation of governmentality by the emergent discourse of “reason of state”. He defined this as taking shape through four commitments: (i) the identification of “civil society” as the state’s necessary correlate, (ii) the aspiration to apply scientific method to governance and administration, (iii) the “sudden appearance of the problem of population in new forms”, and (iv) the justification of state power in the management of nature and the promotion of security.¹⁷

Alluding to Kant’s critique of reason, Foucault judged the cameralist discipline of Polizeiwissenschaft, as encapsulated in Justi’s Elements of Police, to epitomise “the aim of the modern form of government, or state rationality; viz, to develop those elements constitutive of individuals’ lives in such a way that their development also fosters that of the strength of the state”. In a nutshell, Foucault argued that Polizei was committed to the mutual fostering of “both citizens’ lives and the state’s strength”.¹⁸

Foucault’s lectures acted as a catalyst for renewed interest in cameralism. Classic scholars of Polizeiwissenschaften in Germany, such as Michael Stolleis, dismissed Foucault for simply confirming what specialists had long known, but Foucault’s notion of governmentality inspired several important new studies on the topic, namely those by Marcus Sandl and Pascale Laborier.¹⁹ Foucault may indeed have contributed little to the empirical study of cameralism, but he posed important questions concerning the place of cameralism within the longue durée history of state power that suggest the need for a historicised analysis of discourses of state. Inverting his approach to privilege the power of discourse over the scope of individual agency, we seek to historicise his speculative philosophy of the development of governmentality. Drawing upon careful, context-specific and agent-focused inquiries of the adaptations of cameralist though in v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Table
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Interactions
• PART II Widening Perspectives
• PART III Dissemination and Local Mediation
• List of Contributors
• Index