The Cameralists

1909 Kitchener 2001 Batoche Books 52 Eby Street South Kitchener, Ontario N2G 3L1 Canada email: [email protected] Preface. ..........................................................4 Chapter I. Introduction to Cameralism. ................................18 Chapter II. The Civics of Osse. ......................................33 Chapter III. The Civics of Obrecht. ...................................47 Chapter IV: The Cameralistics of Seckendorff. ..........................60 Chapter V: The Cameralistics of Becher. ..............................95 Chapter VI: The Cameralistics of Schröder. ...........................118 Chapter VII: The Cameralistics of Gerhard. ...........................150 Chapter VIII: The Cameralistics of Rohr. .............................159 Chapter IX: The Cameralistics of Gasser..............................176 Chapter X: The Cameralistics of Dithmar. ............................188 Chapter XI: The Cameralistics of Zincke..............................195 Chapter XII: The Cameralistics of Darjes..............................224 Chapter XIII. The Cameralistics of Justi. ..............................239 Chapter XIV: Argument of Justi’s “Staatswirthschaft”...................263 Chapter XV Justi’s Political Philosophy. ..............................333 Chapter XVI: Justi’s “Policeywissenschaft”...........................366 Chapter XVII: Just’s Cameralistic Miscellanies.........................386 Chapter XVIII. The Cameralistics of Sonnenfels (“Introduction”). ..........406 Chapter XIX. The Cameralistics of Sonnenfels (“Polizey”). ...............425 Chapter XX: The Cameralism of Sonnenfels (“Handlung”). ...............443 Chapter XXI. The Cameralistics of Sonnenfels (“Handlung Und Finanz”). ...458 Chapter XXII: Summary...........................................493 Notes..........................................................501 Like its predecessor in this series, Adam Smith and Modern Sociology, the present book is a mere fragment. It deals with a single factor of the social process in the German States. It finds this factor already effective in 1555. It does not attempt to trace each link in the chain of continuity from that date. It reviews the most important seventeenth-century writers in the line of sequence, but the emphasis of the book falls in the eighteenth century. I have carefully excluded the problem of relations between this literary factor and other social elements, and I have purposely refrained from estimating its ratio of importance among the formative forces of the period. Conclusions of that order must come from a larger synthesis, for which the present study supplies merely a detail. To justify my belief that the labor which this book cost was well spent, it would be necessary to prove first, that Americans have much to gain from better understanding of the Germans; and second, that just appreciation of the present social system of the Germans is impossible for Americans unless they are willing to trace it historically. These propositions must be left, however, without the support of argument, merely as the author’s profession of faith. To readers of English only, cameralism is virtually a lost chapter in the history of the social sciences. Although everything now belonging to German polity has a part of its heredity in that type of social theory, not every reputable student of the social sciences in America could correctly define the term, and few could name more than one or two writers to whom it is properly applied. In a word, the cameralists were a series of German writers, from the middle of the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, who approached civic problems from a common viewpoint, who proposed the same central question, and who developed a coherent civic theory, corresponding with the German system of administration at the same time in course of evolution. To the cameralists the central problem of science was the problem of the state. To them the object of all social theory was to Albion Small, The Cameralists, 5 show how the welfare of the state might be secured. They saw in the welfare of the state the source of all other welfare. Their key to the welfare of the state was revenue to supply the needs of the state. Their whole social theory radiated from the central task of furnishing the state with ready means. For reasons to be mentioned later, allusions to the cameralists in English books, whether original or translated, are more frequent among the economists than elsewhere. If, however, we consult the two handbooks of the history of economic theory in most frequent use by students in this country, we find that they barely allude to cameralism, and their historical perspective would be clearer if they did not mention the subject at all. In the second edition of Cossa,1 Klock, Becher, Hornigk (sic), and Schröder are disposed of in a paragraph of about seventy words, and another paragraph two lines longer, in the chapter on the physiocrats (!), mentions the “Chamber Sciences,” as represented by Justi and Sonnenfels only. The third edition of the same book, or the volume which took the place of a third edition, translated under the title An Introduction to the Study of Political Economy, mentions the same three Austrians, and adds a couple of lines on SeckendorS in the section on “Industrial Freedom;” it mentions Gasser, Dithmar, and Darjes in the section on “Professional Chairs, Newspapers, and Academies;” it gives a paragraph each to Justi and Sonnenfels, in the section entitled “Bureaucratic and Professorial Eclecticism;” and then, after a few statements thirty-four pages later, about the “German Physiocrats,” it for the first time finds its bearings among German thinkers with Rau, who began to write a generation after cameralism in the strict sense had passed its prime. Ingram evidently abstracted from Roscher, by some principle of selection which does not appear, a dozen names of German “mercantilists” of the cameralistic period. The summary way in which he disposes of them shows that he had no first- hand knowledge of these writers, and that he utterly misapprehended their place in the history of German thought. If one were so fortunate as to learn the names of the cameralists, and turned to Palgrave for more information, little would be found beyond repetition of scraps gathered from Roscher; and these so disconnected that they would hardly pique curiosity to pry farther. All the other English aids to knowledge of cameralism are so scattered that an adequate introduction to the subject by means of them would be out of the question. During the last generation, American readers of German appear to have relied, as a rule, for information about early phases of German economic thought, chiefly upon Albion Small, The Cameralists, 6 two writers, Kautz2 and Roscher.3 Of Kautz it is enough to say that he was of the rear guard of the rhetoricians. His book is wonderfully plausible if not lucid reading. Its early pages appear to express methodological conclusions which the maturest scholarship has not superseded. Unfortunately, the author’s own procedure, as it appears in the body of the book, shows that for him these imposing propositions had merely the force of impotent generalities. His actual method is first, derivation, by some occult means, of certain general principles under which to subsume the economists of the period; then, second, use of the writers of the period as so many illustrations of the principles. When projected upon this vicious circle, the course of thought in successive stages falls into alluring symmetry. A little inquiry into the facts, however, shows that these pleasing constructions are mainly fictitious. For example, Kautz locates the second of his three great divisions of economic ideas “between the end of the Middle Ages and Adam Smith.” This second period he interprets as that of independent investigation, “in which the national-economic ideas and principles were no longer mixed and combined with the political, legal, and religious systems of theory, but were presented as a totality of peculiar special cognitions.”4 The truth of this generalization depends upon the standard used for measurement of relative bondage to conventionality and independence of it. Compared with the age of the schoolmen the period from Martin Luther to Adam Smith was of course intellectually free. On the other hand, if contemporaries of Kautz had gone back to the economic and political theorists of the intermediate period, with no preparation but nineteenth-century ideas, they would have been amazed at the degree in which social thinking of all sorts was paralyzed by dogmatic prepossessions. Even if Kautz’s generalization had been qualified in a way to make it valid, use of it as a premise from which to deduce interpretation of the economic theories of the period was like finding a sufficient explanation of the course of American experience since 1776 in terms of the mere negative condition of independence from England. Anyone who can have patience with discursive essays upon long-distance impressions of the development of economic theory would find Kautz impressive. As a guide to critical study of the actual process he is impossible. Whatever our estimate, on the other hand, of the “historical school,” and of Roscher’s contributions to economic theory, there can be no doubt about the value of his services to economic-history. The volume cited above, on the history of Albion Small, The Cameralists, 7 economic theory in Germany, has served as

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