Freedom and Capitalism in Early Modern Europe

Mercantilism and the Making of the Modern Economic Mind

Philipp Robinson Rössner

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030533083
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030533090
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Histoire économique

This book hinges upon ideas and discourses variously known under labels such as "Mercantilism" and "Cameralism". Often viewed as antithesis of capitalism, inclusive institutions and good economy in the "West", this book re-assembles them and builds them into a coherent origin story of modern capitalism. It explores the field of intellectual and conceptual history, especially the history of Renaissance and Mercantilism in a longer history of capitalism.  Rather than hindrances, the author argues that Mercantilist and Cameralist political economies presented essential stepping stones of modern capitalism, in Britain and beyond.  This book will be of interest to academics and students in general economic history, the history of capitalism, economic development and the history of economic thought.

© The Author(s) 2020

P. R. RössnerFreedom and Capitalism in Early Modern EuropePalgrave Studies in Economic Historyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53309-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Cameralism, Mercantilism and the Making of the Modern Economic Mind

Philipp Robinson Rössner¹

(1)

School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

Philipp Robinson Rössner

Email: [email protected]

Was English Really Capitalism’s First Language?

Freedom and Capitalism: Rethinking the Political Economy of Societal Change, 1300s–1800s

Cameralism, Mercantilism and the Making of the Wealth of Nations

Mercantilism, Liberalism and Capitalism: A Non-Anglocentric Perspective

Enter Cameralism: A Lost Road to Capitalism?

Deep and Hidden Histories of Laissez-Faire: Sketching the Argument

Abstract

This chapter introduces and summarizes the argument of the book on how mercantilism and its continental variant(s) Cameralism represented foundational cornerstones of capitalism and economic modernity. This transcends traditional historians’ debates on industrial and trade policy (which I will only summarize briefly)—where mercantilist policy and thought are commonly located, introducing aspects of wider industrial policy, regulation and especially Cameralism as a pan-European discourse that positively connected free markets and tried to reconcile laissez-faire with proactive rulers and states intervening in the common weal or common economy in an effective way so as to reduce inequality and promote good social and economic development. Commonly understood as a continental variant or Sonderweg of mercantilism, I argue instead that British or insular mercantilism represented a Sonderweg within a very multifaceted and dynamic system of pan-European economic discourses and political economies commonly summarized as “Cameralism”. I argue that Cameralism needs, ultimately, to be written in the plural, as it can be found not only in the Germanies, i.e. the countries located within the Holy Roman Empire. Cameralism is now understood to have reached from Portugal and Spain to Finland and Norway. But I will focus on the German-speaking lands (where the older literature has commonly located Cameralism), in order to make a point pars pro toto that capitalism’s first language was not English, and that mercantilism (or Cameralism) was much more than a political economy attuned to either the need of the ruler (or centralized) state or a minority of rent seeking individual merchants and capitalists. Cameralists were mainly interested in raising the welfare of the common weal or nation in general. Attuned to each and individual circumstances in situ, Cameralist political economy thus provided rational strategies of empowering competitive laissez-faire and economic development in situ, attuned to its individual circumstances on the ground. With Cameralism we thus have an unusual suspect for modern capitalism; far transcending mercantilism as commonly understood by historians of early modern Europe and histories of economic thought.

Keywords

CapitalismMarketModernityEconomyIndustryEnlightenment

End Abstract

Was English Really Capitalism’s First Language?

There is a common and quite pertinacious myth that capitalism was naturally English, and that capitalism was either invented or first developed in the Anglosphere. “The market economy retained a bit of foreignness for those for whom English and, by extension, capitalism are second languages”, wrote the late Joyce Appleby, one of the most distinguished historians of our age, in what still is a beautifully written and one of the most authoritative history books of today.¹ This myth has influenced historians’ narratives on the rise of capitalism and the West. It couches the origin story of economic modernity in market practices and political economies found in the post-1650 Anglo-Dutch experience of the “first modern economy”; or the example of post-1688 England, later the United Kingdom in what subsequently became the “first industrial nation”; embodying intellectual models that authors such as Hume or Smith would employ in describing and analysing such imputed “new” modes of economy.² The problem is that what twentieth-and twenty-first-centuries historians regard as “new” ways of conceptualizing political economy often were, from an idiosyncratic in situ-viewpoint of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century, old hats. Accordingly, the Dutch and British cases have been interpreted as templates for economic modernity, or the way how things should have been run.³

The problematic nature of such foregone conclusions is at once revealed, if we pay some attention to some other lost voices who are often portrayed by historians as the very antinomy of capitalist economic modernity. Consider this writer for instance. I will reveal his identity in a minute, but just listen to these words. “But no man can become luxurious, in our acceptation of the word, without giving bread to the industrious, without encouraging emulation, industry and agriculture; and without producing the circulation of an adequate equivalent for every service”.⁴ Sentiments such as these are today most commonly associated with great thinkers of the Enlightenment. We would expect to find them in writings by figures such as Montesquieu, Hume or Smith. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), fourth book, Adam Smith indeed advanced a similar argument connecting consumption and luxury by the rich with a model of paternalistic capitalist economic development. Here the luxury of the rich would give food and employment to the poor, and thus raise welfare for all, by trickle-down and multiplier effects that German sociology has, ironically, as the “elevator trick”, moving upward not trickling down (Fahrstuhleffekt).⁵ But that is just a minutiae.

But strangely enough, the above quote comes not from the proto-liberal camp of the usual Scottish Enlightenment suspects, but from a rather unexpected corner, an author who has sometimes been labelled the “last of the mercantilists”: Jacobite exile and contemporary of Adam Smith, Sir James Steuart (1712–1790). Steuart fled his native country Scotland after supporting the Jacobite cause in 1746. He spent years in exile travelling France and the Holy Roman Empire. In the Duchy of Württemberg, at the university town of Tübingen around 1756 he completed major chunks of his opus magnum on political economy which finally appeared in print in 1767 (and was only two years later translated and published in German, at Tübingen). Some would reckon Stuart to the mercantilist genre; others more knowledgeable to the Cameralist spectrum of economic thinking.⁶ Cameralism is usually seen as a decidedly non-Anglo-Saxon way of economic thinking that is often deplored by modern scholarship as strange and marginal, and in many ways as anti-Enlightenment as mercantilism, the other spectrum of economic thought that Steuart is most commonly reckoned to. Still others have put Steuart into the classical economics box, which is a likewise partisan interpretation (based on a close reading of Marx, Das Kapital, vol. I),⁷ and likewise indicative of the ultimately unfruitful task of the historian trying to label pre-modern authors and put them into boxes where they only ill or very loosely fit: mercantilism, Cameralism, classicism, liberalism—all these labels are intrinsically problematic, fluid and fuzzy and often distort more than they enlighten us, but more on that below. But as we will see in subsequent chapters, Cameralism represented not a variant of mercantilism but rather a very mainstream mode of occidental economic thinking in the age before industry, of which mercantilism in the Anglo-Saxon fashion represented a special branch or Sonderweg. And of course, Cameralism squarely belonged to the Enlightenment, as did mercantilism. And, like mercantilism, Cameralism contributed significant features to later views on political economy, including liberalism in its manifold variants.

Thus, the Soul of Modern Economic Man (Myers)⁸ may actually be schizophrenic, especially when the history of economic thought in the West as commonly portrayed in the mainstream literature of the post-1970 neoliberal turn is taken as the reference point: this literature has often limited the idea of capitalism and possessive individualism to Anglo-Saxon thinkers and sketched its genealogy from Hobbes to Smith, largely ignoring or dismissing continental contributions under Cameralism and related natural law theories of governance and economy as belonging to a different canon. Modern software such as the new MS Office 365 spell check constantly wants me to change “Cameralism” (a word it does not know) into “camelish”, which the common English language dictionary renders as “like a camel”, or “obsolete.” If switched to the German language version, where Kameralismus—one of the oldest university disciplines in the West—is likewise unknown, the spell-checker suggests “Amoralismus” (amoralism) instead. Both suggestions are fully in line with the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Cameralism, Mercantilism and the Making of the Modern Economic Mind
• 2. Debating Capitalism and Economic Modernity in Early Modern Europe
• 3. Early Modern Economic Lives
• 4. Early Modern Political Economy and the Market: A Life on the Margins?
• 5. Capitalism and Freedom in Pre-modern Thought
• 6. Creating Freedom, Constructing “Laissez-Faire”
• 7. Strange Origins of Capitalism
• Back Matter