Cameralism, Capitalism, and the Making of the Modern Economic Mind Philipp Robinson Rössner
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Introduction: Cameralism, Capitalism, and the Making of the Modern Economic Mind Philipp Robinson Rössner Capitalism is often assumed to have been invented in the Anglosphere. Writings by David Hume and Adam Smith have been named as corner- stones in the making of capitalism and modern economic knowledge. But as Alexander von Rüstow, a leading twentieth-century German Ordo-lib- eral thinker argued, during the nineteenth century, Adam Smith’s vision of the market as a natural and God-given order had degenerated into a dark theology of ruthless laissez-faire which, in the German case, had led to the common Schumpeterian perversions of capitalism: high economic inequality, monopoly, and cartelization and national socialism (Rüstow 2009; on economic theology and neoliberalism, see Schwarzkopf 2019). Like Rüstow, however, present-day historians of political economy have tended to miss crucial bits of the story. First, Smith’s and the other Enlight- enment Scots’ works1 built on a commercial tradition that had been mani- fest in Anglo-Saxon economics since the sixteenth century or earlier. Sec- ond, this tradition of thinking about commercial society became quite widespread and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries extended to the entire European continent, where it became commonly known, at least today, under the name Cameralism. The usual group of suspects starts with mercantilist authors such as Thomas Mun and Gerard de Malynes, earlier Correspondence may be addressed to Philipp Robinson Rössner by email: philipp.roessner@ manchester.ac.uk. I would like to thank Carl Wennerlind and Kevin Hoover for useful comments. 1. On Hume’s economics, see Schabas and Wennerlind 2020. History of Political Economy 53:3 DOI 10.1215/00182702-8993260 Copyright 2021 by Duke University Press Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/hope/article-pdf/53/3/371/925650/0530371.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 372 History of Political Economy 53:3 (2021) Sir Thomas Gresham, later on John Cary and others, then covering proto- or crypto-classicals (William Petty), and finally arrives at the towering Scotsmen David Hume, James Steuart, and Adam Smith (see most recently Faccarello and Kurz 2016). But in the case of English writers, there is one historical peculiarity: they usually came from a mercantile background. So, when Edward Misselden or Thomas Gresham wrote about exchange rates (de Roover 1949), Mun on trade and industry, and so on, we might expect similar outcomes as when asking Steven Mnuchin to write a textbook on the fundamentals of finance, Silvio Berlusconi on taxation, or Richard Branson on industrial policy. This does not necessar- ily imply bad scholarship or dilettantism on the authors’ grounds; quite the contrary.2 But the historian—Marxist or non-Marxist—can expect certain biases in their writings that go together with the broader socio- economic interests shared with the social groups at which these writings were usually directed. To be a merchant in the seventeenth century was compared (by Mun) to the earlier ideals of Renaissance man—their knowledge, profi- ciencies, linguistic skills, and more were considered extraordinary. Also, companies (in particular the East India Company) were and acted like quasi-states, so in early modern England, where key works in economics were produced, the merchant’s role was beyond that of mere traders. This Anglocentric perspective is important when constructing, like Marx did in Capital, vol. 1, the history of mercantilism as a “bourgeois” political economy (see below).3 We also ought to consider what earlier German philosophy of history had as “viewpoints” or, in German, Sehepunkte: reflecting the individual authors’ mental, psychological, and sociological background going beyond social class.4 Gresham, Mun, and Malynes thus were natural advocates of commercial society, even before the concept began to gain currency in the debates around constitutions, the Glorious Revolution (Pincus 2009: chap. 12), and, finally, the Enlightenment (for a most recent overview, see the introduction to Schabas and Wennerlind 2020). As Malynes argued: “Questionlesse therefore, the State of a Mer- chant is of great dignitie and to bee cherished, for by them Countreys are discouered, Familiaritie betweene Nations is procured, and politike Expe- rience is attained” (Malynes 1629: epistle). 2. When I studied micro- and macroeconomics at Göttingen University in the 1990s, many professors there had businesses alongside their chairs; this was considered a sideline. 3. I am indebted to Carl Wennerlind for reminding me of this. 4. This is a Marxist position, for sure, but not everything Marx said was wrong. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/hope/article-pdf/53/3/371/925650/0530371.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Rössner / Introduction 373 Interestingly, Malynes was quoted in a later major work in political econ- omy of its time, Wilhelm von Schröder’s Princely Treasure and Exchequer (1686), a bestselling work during the seventeenth and eighteenth century (E. Reinert and Carpenter 2016). Schröder, a Cameralist, came from a very different genre and vantage point sharing very few prima facie con- nection points with those Anglophone economic writings of the enlight- ened mercantilists that have often been proposed as precursors to classical liberalism and modern economic thought (e.g., Appleby 1976). In fact, until recently, Cameralism has often been considered the exact opposite or antinomy to liberalism and possessive individualism.5 So the main purpose of the following articles is to deal away with this myth and lay bare new connections between Cameralist economic thought, capitalism, and the ori- gins of economic modernity.6 As an Austro-German Cameralist, Schröder was socialized first within the protestant academic circles around Secken- dorff, Gotha, and the University of Jena. But later, like Philipp Hörnigk and Johann Becher (the other two leading Cameralists of the later seven- teenth century), Schröder converted to Catholicism to become an admin- istrator in the service of the emperor. But he also developed strong affilia- tions with the Royal Society, having extensively traveled the British Isles. He was familiar with late seventeenth-century English political economy and major debates of the time including the famous Tory-Whig divide about manufacturing or agriculture as the “true” sources of the nation’s wealth (e.g., Pincus 2009). Yet Schröder’s work championed a very differ- ent epistemic vantage point. For him capitalism, economic development, and the wealth of the nations started (and possibly ended) with the prince. Only a well-governed, meaning princely, common weal could provide the foundations of sustainable wealth, wealth that could be tapped into with- out impoverishing the nation. To the modern economic ear this sounds counterintuitive, but we must not forget that the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German “prince” in political and economic writings usually translates into modern English as “the state.” Neither constitutional monarchy in the English fashion nor republics were known outside the Netherlands. In contemporary political 5. But see Outram 2013, or Nokkala and Miller 2019. 6. Note that while I greatly admire Rüstow and Sombart, and partly Karl Marx, I would not entirely adopt their pessimistic definition of capitalism as a form of economic degeneration (concentration, cartelization, monopolies, and rogue laissez-faire) that during the nineteenth century progressively corrupted and alienated humankind from its natural physical and mate- rial instincts. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/hope/article-pdf/53/3/371/925650/0530371.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 374 History of Political Economy 53:3 (2021) economy der Staat in the modern sense did not yet exist in its modern conceptual shape. Yet this does not mean it was absent either. Modern development economics and neo-institutionalism have spared no ink high- lighting the role of the state in the process of economic growth (e.g., North, Wallis, and Weingast 2009; Acemoglu and Robinson 2012). But Cameral- ism has not featured in the debates yet. Some scholars have viewed Camer- alism as a science of state, others as a discourse or pedagogy (Tribe 2008), others as a chimera of worlds too good to be true, invented by self-seeking princely administrators desperately trying to get a job at one of the hun- dreds of lesser courts in early modern Germany (Wakefield 2009). Some have seen Cameralism’s virtues as a political economy (Bog 1984), others as a proto-theory of economic development (Reinert 2007; Reinert and Rössner 2016). But mostly it has vanished from the scene. As the contribu- tions assembled in the present issue show, Cameralism should be seen as central to the formation of the European economic mind and the coming of capitalism, given the idiosyncratic frameworks of time, space, and society. Enlightenment must be written in the plural. And there were many politi- cal economies of capitalism, tied to idiosyncratic conditions of their spe- cific countries, societies, and location points in both time and space. Studying the “mind and the market” (Muller 2011) can be limited to nei- ther the Scottish Enlightenment nor earlier Anglophone writers, lest the “soul of modern man” (Myers 1985) become schizophrenic. Continental authors of the Cameralist-mercantilist spectrum—a concept which has become extended in recent studies to many branches of European eco- nomic thought (e.g., Nokkala and Miller 2019; Seppel