The development of cameralism

Cameralism was a form of academic pedagogy aimed at the future administrators of the eighteenth-century German territorial states. As a written discourse it was embodied in the several hundred textbooks produced for use by students in German, Austrian, and Baltic universities between the 1720s and the 1790s. The first chairs dedicated to it were founded in 1727; the period 1760–80 saw its consolidation and diffusion, but during the later 1790s it entered a phase of terminal intellectual and institutional decline. The name persisted up to the end of the nineteenth century as a synonym for the economics of state administration, although its function had long been displaced by faculties of law, and its substance by Nationalökonomie. Its very nature and purpose as a pedagogic discourse rendered it unsuitable for contemporary translation into English, French, or Italian; consequently it had no manifest resonances among those writers who provided the foundations of political economy. Moreover, commentary upon it has been to this day largely confined to the German language, placing it therefore on the margins of Anglo-French eighteenth-century studies.

From the standpoint of a modern literature of commentary, it thus represents a hermetic tradition in more ways than one – remote, esoteric, and confined very much within a particular, though extensive, linguistic zone. Traditionally, it has been the French Enlightenment, the French and American Revolutions, and more recently also the Scottish Enlightenment that have been identified as the leading sources of modern political theory. In so far as the German Enlightenment was taken into account, it was generally viewed as a literary or philosophical phenomenon, of limited interest beyond a handful of key figures.