Introduction: Cameralism in Practice

Summary

The primary aim of this book is to clarify the impact of cameralism in early modern Europe, and to make a tighter connection between cameralist teaching on the one hand, and administrative and economic practices on the other. It was the latter that came first: officials working in the seventeenth-century Kammer of the German territorial states were known as Kameralisten. ‘Cameralism’ later became the name by which both teaching and practice were known, although more closely associated with the teaching than the practice. Cameralist teaching was directed to the state's interest in its resources, in better administration and in the common good, the purpose being in order to increase the prince's incomes, establish a sustainable development of economy, and create a well-ordered state.

The essays collected here explore the practices and spheres in which cameralist teaching left its mark in early modern Europe. It is exactly this linking of cameralist ideas to contemporary politics and practice which offers an important historical dimension for understanding cameralist literature. For too long the approach to cameralism has treated it as a body of thought, analysing one or another cameralist author's standpoints and works. Another approach has been to study cameralist literature through the prism of a certain issue (e.g. cameralist perceptions of the role of the court, of the functioning of the grain trade, of population policy, the role of guilds, the importance of mining, policy doctrines and the state, the centrality of happiness, of work, or of gender). The focus has been directed not so much to the application of cameralist ideas, but rather to the alleged ‘theoretical foundations’ of cameralism.

Of course, the question of whether economic ideas were reflected in any real practice is not new, and is a widely discussed topic. Research on cameralist teaching has in fact for some time taken an interest in the actual practice of cameralist principles in the early modern state. The subtitle of Andre Wakefield's book of 2009 is ‘German Cameralism as Science and Practice’. He suggests that cameralism, qua Kameralwissenschaft, was a kind of fantasy fiction and utopian theory, rather than any plan that could be put to use in administrative practice. He argues that ‘Cameralists liked to publish “practical” treatises about how to brew beer or raise cattle, for example, and they often made it sound easy.