The Transition to Needs and their Satisfaction
The vogue for critical philosophy had at first a largely superficial impact on cameralis- tic discourse; the terminology was adopted, but the older literature to which reference was made sustained an older understanding of state and subject, in which the reasoning action of a subject was not directly considered.
By 1797 it had penetrated deeper; those teachers whose task it was to represent the subject matter of cameralism to students begin to revamp systematically their lectures and textbooks. The typical result of this is at first a degenerated form of philosophical discourse which bears only marginally on the practical business of administration which had always been the subject matter for cameralist writers. However, there are two important features of this: first, the source upon which these writers draw is not Kantian epistemology as such, but the implications of this for natural law and a theory of personality; and secondly, the new terminology begins, despite its posturing, to effect a reorganisation of the conventions of cameralistic teaching.Translated into the new natural law, this principle can be generalised into what Schmalz calls “the first original right of man, his right to autonomy” (Schmalz 1792: 29, s. 39, original emphasis). Accordingly, the conceptions of welfare and happiness that prevailed in the conventional cameralistic literature are decisively rebutted. It is no longer the activity of government which creates and maintains order, the welfare of the subject being constantly overseen and organised by the state. The seat of reason has shifted to a knowledgeable citizen capable of making judgements and acting upon them; and instead of a Staatswirthschaft, a new Wirtschaftslehre begins to emerge. This constructs a conception of economic processes around the needs of the person. Instead of the endless work of economic administration that typifies the conventions of cameralistic discourse, the economy itself becomes a self-constituting process and the form of order of civil society.
Economic activity is initiated in the process of appropriation of nature by human beings - this transforms the natural world into one of goods: “Goods in the most general sense are those things over which the person is capable of exercising property.... Actual goods are constituted in the hands of man only through the application of his physical and moral powers, or, what is the same thing, through labour” (Schlozer 1805: 14-15, ss.15, 17, original emphasis).
In succession, then, the surplus of goods obtained through production enables a process of exchange to develop, and thereby the accumulation of capital in the world of goods (as distinct from personal capital). This capital, argues Schlozer, is consumed in use, and it is therefore necessary to renew and replace capital out of the revenue to which it gives rises. The rate at which this is done depends on the productivity of labour, itself dependent on the varying composition of capital and labour in the process of production. Likewise, out of the process of exchange there arises (on the basis of use value) exchange value, which although subjectively assessed, is ultimately based upon the amount of labour embodied in it. The doctrines of wealth elaborated around the ruler and his people has been definitively replaced by one oriented to an economic subject who creates his own wealth through his activity.
Keith Tribe