The Transition from Court to University

It was in 1727 that this discourse first entered the university: Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia decreed that two chairs be established, in “Oeconomie, Policey und Cammersachen” at the University of Halle, and in “Kameral-Okonomie und Polizeiwissenschaft” at the University of Frankfurt on the Oder.

Comparison with the textbook written by the Frankfurt appointee, Justus Christoph Dithmar, suggests that he had a better grasp of the relationship between administration and the economy, and his work was subsequently twice republished.

Institutional initiatives to mid-century were indeed sporadic and short lived; one account suggests that out of 32 German, Scandinavian, Dutch, Swiss and Austrian universities only three had cameralistic chairs - Abo (that is, Turku), Gottingen and Rinteln. This is certainly inaccurate, for a chair had been founded at Uppsala in 1741 by Anders Berch, and a number of academies existed where the subject was taught; but it serves to bring up an important feature: that cameralism was a new subject that emerged in the curriculum of northern, Protestant universities. Little is known about Rinteln (a small university near Hanover that was entirely destroyed by the invading French forces in 1809) besides the fact that Johann Hermann Furstenau was appointed professor of agriculture there in 1730, and he subsequently published the third cameralistic textbook, Grundliche Anleitung Zu der Haushaltungs-Kunst, in 1736. By contrast, Gottingen’s importance as a new university directed at the training of public officials of all kinds is well-known, but an independent chair of cameralistic science was never founded there. Instead, various parts of the broadly defined Staatswissenschaften were taught by Gottfried Achenwall, Johann Beckmann and August Ludwig Schlozer. However, in 1755 Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi was appointed Councillor for Mines and Police Director, with the right to lecture in the university.

Justi made his name by writing, not teaching. He was vehemently opposed to the role of “projectors” in the formulation of policy for the territorial state, but was himself one of the last representatives of this genre, a prolific writer who lived from his writing, both in the sense of selling his books to readers and selling himself to clients - to Haugwitz and the reformers in mid-century Vienna, to agricultural reformers in Copenhagen and, finally, to the Prussian administration.

In the same year as his appointment in Gδttingen, Justi published his Staatswirthschaft, subtitled “On the maintenance and increase of the entire property of the state, for which the principles of Staatskunst, Polizei and commercial science, as well as oeconomy, are necessary”. At this time, Staat and burgerliche Gesellschaft were used synonymously - and so while we today would translate the title of Justi’s book as “state economy”, “state” includes what we would today understand as “society”. Justi’s book accordingly deals not only with the work of political and economic man­agement, but also includes provisions for the good order of social life, excluding only the conduct of private households. The object of management, according to Justi, is state property - defined as including not simply all moveable and immoveable goods within the frontiers of the land, but also the capacities and skills of its inhabitants - and the purpose of management is the augmentation of state property to the greatest extent possible.

Justi’s book was neither concise nor brief - it ran to 1245 pages in the first edition, and his later works varied the same themes at greater length, relying to a great extent on self-plagiarism and thereby betraying his reliance on an income directly from his writing rather than his teaching. Staatswirthschaft and its successors provided a foundation for a rapid expansion in cameralistic literature in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the most prominent exponent of which was Josef von Sonnenfels, appointed in 1763 to the newly founded chair of police and cameralistic sciences at the University of Vienna.

The reproduction of cameralistic discourse upon the foundations outlined above was halted by the rise of a critical philosophy founded upon a new anthropology, in which the interaction of free human beings exercising their reason created order, not the statesman. In all the cameralistic textbooks published during the 1760s to the early 1790s we encounter the same assumptions and assertions concerning the nature of the state as the embodiment of social and political order. Also, in the initial phases of the cameralistic reception of critical philosophy we find a tendency to take up the new slogans and categorisations, without these however displacing the established concep­tual framework and order of exposition, for the older tradition did retain some scope for flexible response. Johann Christian Christoph Rudiger, Professor at Halle and Assessor in the Prussian Salt Office, began for example his Introductory Foundations for a General Doctrine of the State by noting that “every cultivated person lives as a citizen in the state, and he must find agreeable the ability to judge, correctly and according to principles, basic arrangements and relations, government and its institutions” (Rudiger 1795: 1, s. 1).

This suggests that, contrary to the view of Wolff, the subject was a citizen capable of exercising good judgement.

The “dictate of reason” commands that every proper means be employed to enhance external perfection in order to sustain inner perfection - for “Ein unwirthschaftlicher Mann ist immer ein sehr unglucklicher Mensch'" (“a man lacking in economy is always a very unhappy man”) (Walther 1795: 16, s. 18). Reversing this, it might be said that a happy person was “economic man”, for as Bensen noted a little later, “Thanks to his reason the person is an absolutely self-acting (selbstthdtiges) being.” (Bensen 1798: 25, s. 27). These and other texts continued to refer to the older literature, but inflected it through the new anthropological principles.