Introduction: Cameralism, Capitalism, and the Making of the Modern Economic Mind
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Introduction:
Cameralism, Capitalism,
and the Making of the
Modern Economic Mind
Philipp Robinson Rössner
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Capitalism is often assumed to have been invented in the Anglosphere.
Writings by David Hume and Adam Smith have been named as corner-
stones in the making of capitalism and modern economic knowledge. But
as Alexander von Rüstow, a leading twentieth-century German Ordo-lib-
eral thinker argued, during the nineteenth century, Adam Smith’s vision
of the market as a natural and God-given order had degenerated into a
dark theology of ruthless laissez-faire which, in the German case, had led
to the common Schumpeterian perversions of capitalism: high economic
inequality, monopoly, and cartelization and national socialism (Rüstow
2009; on economic theology and neoliberalism, see Schwarzkopf 2019).
Like Rüstow, however, present-day historians of political economy have
tended to miss crucial bits of the story. First, Smith’s and the other Enlight-
enment Scots’ works1 built on a commercial tradition that had been mani-
fest in Anglo-Saxon economics since the sixteenth century or earlier. Sec-
ond, this tradition of thinking about commercial society became quite
widespread and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries extended to the
entire European continent, where it became commonly known, at least
today, under the name Cameralism. The usual group of suspects starts with
mercantilist authors such as Thomas Mun and Gerard de Malynes, earlier
Correspondence may be addressed to Philipp Robinson Rössner by email: philipp.roessner@
manchester.ac.uk. I would like to thank Carl Wennerlind and Kevin Hoover for useful comments.
1. On Hume’s economics, see Schabas and Wennerlind 2020.
History of Political Economy 53:3 DOI 10.1215/00182702-8993260
Copyright 2021 by Duke University Press372 History of Political Economy 53:3 (2021)
Sir Thomas Gresham, later on John Cary and others, then covering proto-
or crypto-classicals (William Petty), and finally arrives at the towering
Scotsmen David Hume, James Steuart, and Adam Smith (see most
recently Faccarello and Kurz 2016). But in the case of English writers,
there is one historical peculiarity: they usually came from a mercantile
background. So, when Edward Misselden or Thomas Gresham wrote
about exchange rates (de Roover 1949), Mun on trade and industry, and so
on, we might expect similar outcomes as when asking Steven Mnuchin to
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write a textbook on the fundamentals of finance, Silvio Berlusconi on
taxation, or Richard Branson on industrial policy. This does not necessar-
ily imply bad scholarship or dilettantism on the authors’ grounds; quite the
contrary.2 But the historian—Marxist or non-Marxist—can expect certain
biases in their writings that go together with the broader socio-economic
interests shared with the social groups at which these writings were usually
directed. To be a merchant in the seventeenth century was compared (by
Mun) to the earlier ideals of Renaissance man—their knowledge, profi-
ciencies, linguistic skills, and more were considered extraordinary. Also,
companies (in particular the East India Company) were and acted like
quasi-states, so in early modern England, where key works in economics
were produced, the merchant’s role was beyond that of mere traders. This
Anglocentric perspective is important when constructing, like Marx did
in Capital, vol. 1, the history of mercantilism as a “bourgeois” political
economy (see below).3 We also ought to consider what earlier German
philosophy of history had as “viewpoints” or, in German, Sehepunkte:
reflecting the individual authors’ mental, psychological, and sociological
background going beyond social class.4 Gresham, Mun, and Malynes thus
were natural advocates of commercial society, even before the concept
began to gain currency in the debates around constitutions, the Glorious
Revolution (Pincus 2009: chap. 12), and, finally, the Enlightenment (for a
most recent overview, see the introduction to Schabas and Wennerlind
2020). As Malynes argued: “Questionlesse therefore, the State of a Mer-
chant is of great dignitie and to bee cherished, for by them Countreys are
discouered, Familiaritie betweene Nations is procured, and politike Expe-
rience is attained” (Malynes 1629: epistle).
2. When I studied micro- and macroeconomics at Göttingen University in the 1990s, many
professors there had businesses alongside their chairs; this was considered a sideline.
3. I am indebted to Carl Wennerlind for reminding me of this.
4. This is a Marxist position, for sure, but not everything Marx said was wrong.Rössner / Introduction 373
Interestingly, Malynes was quoted in a later major work in political econ-
omy of its time, Wilhelm von Schröder’s Princely Treasure and Exchequer
(1686), a bestselling work during the seventeenth and eighteenth century
(E. Reinert and Carpenter 2016). Schröder, a Cameralist, came from a
very different genre and vantage point sharing very few prima facie con-
nection points with those Anglophone economic writings of the enlight-
ened mercantilists that have often been proposed as precursors to classical
liberalism and modern economic thought (e.g., Appleby 1976). In fact,
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until recently, Cameralism has often been considered the exact opposite or
antinomy to liberalism and possessive individualism.5 So the main purpose
of the following articles is to deal away with this myth and lay bare new
connections between Cameralist economic thought, capitalism, and the ori-
gins of economic modernity.6 As an Austro-German Cameralist, Schröder
was socialized first within the protestant academic circles around Secken-
dorff, Gotha, and the University of Jena. But later, like Philipp Hörnigk
and Johann Becher (the other two leading Cameralists of the later seven-
teenth century), Schröder converted to Catholicism to become an admin-
istrator in the service of the emperor. But he also developed strong affilia-
tions with the Royal Society, having extensively traveled the British Isles.
He was familiar with late seventeenth-century English political economy
and major debates of the time including the famous Tory-Whig divide
about manufacturing or agriculture as the “true” sources of the nation’s
wealth (e.g., Pincus 2009). Yet Schröder’s work championed a very differ-
ent epistemic vantage point. For him capitalism, economic development,
and the wealth of the nations started (and possibly ended) with the prince.
Only a well-governed, meaning princely, common weal could provide the
foundations of sustainable wealth, wealth that could be tapped into with-
out impoverishing the nation.
To the modern economic ear this sounds counterintuitive, but we must
not forget that the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German “prince”
in political and economic writings usually translates into modern English
as “the state.” Neither constitutional monarchy in the English fashion nor
republics were known outside the Netherlands. In contemporary political
5. But see Outram 2013, or Nokkala and Miller 2019.
6. Note that while I greatly admire Rüstow and Sombart, and partly Karl Marx, I would not
entirely adopt their pessimistic definition of capitalism as a form of economic degeneration
(concentration, cartelization, monopolies, and rogue laissez-faire) that during the nineteenth
century progressively corrupted and alienated humankind from its natural physical and mate-
rial instincts.374 History of Political Economy 53:3 (2021)
economy der Staat in the modern sense did not yet exist in its modern
conceptual shape. Yet this does not mean it was absent either. Modern
development economics and neo-institutionalism have spared no ink high-
lighting the role of the state in the process of economic growth (e.g., North,
Wallis, and Weingast 2009; Acemoglu and Robinson 2012). But Cameral-
ism has not featured in the debates yet. Some scholars have viewed Camer-
alism as a science of state, others as a discourse or pedagogy (Tribe 2008),
others as a chimera of worlds too good to be true, invented by self-seeking
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princely administrators desperately trying to get a job at one of the hun-
dreds of lesser courts in early modern Germany (Wakefield 2009). Some
have seen Cameralism’s virtues as a political economy (Bog 1984), others
as a proto-theory of economic development (Reinert 2007; Reinert and
Rössner 2016). But mostly it has vanished from the scene. As the contribu-
tions assembled in the present issue show, Cameralism should be seen as
central to the formation of the European economic mind and the coming of
capitalism, given the idiosyncratic frameworks of time, space, and society.
Enlightenment must be written in the plural. And there were many politi-
cal economies of capitalism, tied to idiosyncratic conditions of their spe-
cific countries, societies, and location points in both time and space.
Studying the “mind and the market” (Muller 2011) can be limited to nei-
ther the Scottish Enlightenment nor earlier Anglophone writers, lest the
“soul of modern man” (Myers 1985) become schizophrenic. Continental
authors of the Cameralist-mercantilist spectrum—a concept which has
become extended in recent studies to many branches of European eco-
nomic thought (e.g., Nokkala and Miller 2019; Seppel and Tribe 2017;
Rössner 2016a)—were quite in tune with post-1688 and early Enlighten-
ment Anglophone visions of markets and good governance, commerce,
capitalism, and commercial society. Their models evolved around individ-
ual economic “freedom,” possessive individualism, natural rights, com-
petitive markets, and economic dynamics in a general sense (see, e.g.,
Magnusson 2019; or Lars Magnusson’s article in this issue), as did the
writings by their Anglophone siblings.
The usual genealogy of capitalist political economy, foundations of
which were established by Marx (Capital, vol. 1), starts with William
Petty, Richard Cantillon, and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot and then winds
down a well-known line from Adam Smith to David Ricardo, including
John Stuart Mill and Marx himself (e.g., Perelman 2004; Faccarello and
Kurz 2016, vol. 1). Early modern European economics, such as Scholasti-
cism, Hausväter oikonomics (domestic and aristocratic household andRössner / Introduction 375
farm management), mercantilism and Cameralism, Colbertism, Econo-
mia Civile, and so forth—not to speak of non-European contributions to
economics, such as Chinese, Indian, or Buddhist economics—are often
dismissed, ignored, or considered as Sonderwege, epistemic aberrations
or dead ends; one manifest cause for this interpretation is the still popular
(and fallacious) mercantilism as rent-seeking hypothesis (see Ekelund and
Tollison 1981; Mokyr 2009: chap. 4). And one can still read in major text-
books on the history of economic thought that Europeans managed to
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close Pandora’s box during the nineteenth century by finally discovering
good political economy through putting mercantilism (and, by extension,
Cameralism) into the dustbin of intellectual history and political econ-
omy. As we have seen above, this interpretation was even shared by those
German neoliberals who were decidedly skeptical of nineteenth-century
British economic liberalism or “Smithianism” as it was known in German
academic circles (Rüstow 2009; Schefold 1998).
But capitalism and economic modernity had many origin points, some
of which firmly rest within the “mercantilism” spectrum, to which Cam-
eralism is often reckoned by default. While the Marxian genealogy of
political economy was tacitly acknowledged even among non-Marxist
scholars in the West, perhaps the most scandalous omission Marx ever
made was to omit the Cameralists. The same goes for Keynes, who dis-
cussed mercantilism and the medieval Scholastics in chapter 23 of the
General Theory (Keynes 1936) yet omitted Cameralism (which could
have provided him with even better-fitting historical examples for the
points he wanted to make with his historical excursus). Marx’s historical
analysis of “original” or “primitive” accumulation (in English translations
ursprüngliche Akkumulation is often rendered misleadingly as “primitive
accumulation”) was based on early modern England, and English early
bourgeois political economy, today known as “mercantilist/mercantil-
ism.” Marx’s contemporary Friedrich List on the other hand drafted a
broader roadmap to modern capitalism but likewise refrained from using
the Cameralist label, even though he had, as Georg Eckert’s article in the
present issue demonstrates, been thoroughly raised and firmly grounded
within a Cameralist intellectual and governmental tradition.
Modern malware such as the new MS Office 365 spell-checker con-
stantly wants me to change “Cameralism” (a word it does not know) into
“camelish,” which the common English language dictionary renders as
“like a camel,” or “obsolete.” Switching to the German language version,
to which Kameralismus—one of the oldest academic disciplines in the376 History of Political Economy 53:3 (2021)
West—is likewise unknown, the spell-checker consistently suggests
“Amoralismus” (amoralism) instead. Both are fully in line with a general
neoliberal sentiment that sees mercantilism and Cameralism as theoretical
aberrations or intellectual dead ends (expressed most eloquently in Mokyr
2009, chap. 4). Even the German neoliberal flagship periodical, the politi-
cally green and left-leaning but economically free-marketeer weekly Der
Spiegel, featured, in 2016 and 2017, two covers: one depicting President
Trump brandishing a bloodied knife and holding aloft the severed head of
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the Statue of Liberty and the other as a dangerous asteroid hurtling toward
planet Earth; the respective subtitles read “America First” and “The End of
the World (as we know it).”7 The message was clear.
There could hardly be a better example exposing the intellectual schizo-
phrenia of the modern progressive-liberal mind in the West, associating
protectionism with the forces of Evil (in a literal soteriological sense),
drawing misgiven parallels to mercantilism and early modern absolutism,
simultaneously misreading core ideas embodied in early modern political
economy as well as sketching skewed simultaneous histories of the evolu-
tion of capitalism and modern economic thought. Thus, another motiva-
tion of the present special issue was to correct some of the most signifi-
cantly wrong myths (all myths are wrong, yet most of them carry an
element of “truth” merely because they try to explain something that is
true) held by modern progressionists, not in order to destroy, but to resusci-
tate progressivism, and improve our stories by getting a better picture of
the history of political economy that may also help us get better political
economies that go beyond vulgar freemarketeerism and “Trumponomics,”
toward more enlightened models and modes of political economy.
Continental Cameralist and mercantilist authors in the early modern
period were quite close to the enlightened schools of economic analysis
during the mid-eighteenth century, and that is what the following special
issue wants to draw out, as well. Never mind that terms such as liberal
and liberalism have little meaning in an eighteenth-century context. In
fact, they are profoundly anachronistic in any pre-1789 context, even
though some have located liberalism’s origins in Christian Antiquity (e.g.,
Siedentop 2015). But there is a wider point to be made about freedom and
capitalism. These were not reserved in any way to, nor “discovered” by, the
English-speaking but decidedly Scottish-thinking authors of the Enlighten-
7. See Der Spiegel’s depository of 2016 and 2017 title pages: www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/
index-2016.html.Rössner / Introduction 377
ment (on Hume, see Schabas and Wennerlind 2020). A growing research at
the crossroads of the history of economics and economic thought, eco-
nomic history, and the history of concepts as well as intellectual history
and the history of ideas in a wider sense has painted an ever more complex
picture and, by means of intellectual archaeology, reconstructed a history
of economic modernity which does not square any more with the idea that
capitalism and modern economic analysis were invented in the eighteenth-
century Enlightenment.
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I have taken the liberty of deriving some broader conclusions from the
following articles, in combination with a cursory reading of other recent
surveys (Seppel and Tribe 2017; Rössner 2016; Isenmann 2014; Stern and
Wennerlind 2014; Nokkala and Miller 2019), conclusions which may not
necessarily be the ones derived by the individual authors themselves. But I
would hope that the following will at least explain some of my broader
claims. My reading is that Cameralism represented not a variant of mercan-
tilism but rather a very mainstream mode of occidental economic thought,
and that Anglo-Saxon mercantilism, exposed in common English-language
writings from Mun to Sir James Steuart, somewhat represents the “odd
man out.” And of course, it squarely belonged to the Enlightenment, as did
Smith and Hume, or Steuart, who has sometimes been labeled the “last of
the mercantilists.” As mentioned previously, it is still common to argue that
“the market economy retained a bit of foreignness for those for whom
English and, by extension, capitalism are second languages,” as wrote the
late Joyce Appleby, one of the most distinguished historians of our age, in
what still is one of the most authoritative history works of our day (Appleby
2011: 21). Even some of the finest economists and historians of our time still
believe it, a sentiment that is entirely reasonable but only when limiting the
evidence to scholarly literature written in English before about 2000, ignor-
ing scholarship produced outside the Anglosphere, as well as more recent
advances in the history of political economy (e.g., Mokyr 2011: chap. 4;
Sandmo 2011). Another cherished myth still replicated today is the idea that
the mercantilists’ main goal—which tacitly always included Cameralists—
was to maximize the domestic treasury of gold or silver (Mazzucato 2018:
23). As the paper by Magnusson demonstrates, after the sixteenth century
no self-respecting “mercantilist” would have bought into this anymore.
Thus, capitalism and economic modernity—and thus modern political
economy broadly speaking—had a wider and more complex family tree,
and more deep-historical origins than is usually acknowledged; and one of
the prime goals of the present special issue is to provide a more detailed378 History of Political Economy 53:3 (2021)
explanation of this, by taking Cameralism seriously, as a very continental
yet not particularly German way toward capitalism.
This occasions a few disclaimers. First: terms such as capitalism, mer-
cantilism, and even Cameralism are in many ways anachronistic, in others,
misnomers, or are outright problematic. “Capitalism” is a nineteenth cen-
tury concept invented by its critics (Kocka 2016; Kocka and van der Lin-
den 2018). There are many who remain unconvinced of the term and its
use, especially economists and many economic historians. And there are
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still some good reasons for this. Mercantilism, on the one hand, in the
strictest sense of word, is anachronistic, too, but at least the term mercan-
tile system was contemporaneous, used by writers such as Honoré de Mira-
beau and later Adam Smith (1776). Cameralism on the other hand was
contemporaneous, known as Kameralwissenschaften, established as a uni-
versity discipline in 1727 at Frankfurt/Oder and 1723 at Halle/Saale. As a
science and discourse it had existed way before (see the introduction to
Schefold 2009, and the bibliography in Humpert 1939, which goes back
into the fifteenth century). Halle was the leading pietist university of its
age, where towering philosophers lived and taught, including Christian
Wolff, whose natural law theory fundamentally influenced eighteenth-
century Cameralism and Enlightenment German political thought (Nok-
kala 2019). The focus of the following articles will also be invariably
Eurocentric, albeit at least one scholar among the group assembled here
(Cunha) has mapped Cameralism’s reach to Brazil, where the Portuguese
court relocated when in exile (Cardoso and Cunha 2012). Recently scholars
have emphasized the almost pan-European nature of political economy
discourses under the “Cameralism” label (Seppel and Tribe 2017; Röss-
ner 2016b), beginning to use the term Cameralism more flexibly and
eclectically (e.g., Albritton Jonsson 2015; S. Reinert 2020). In the older lit-
erature of Staatswissenschaften, the term most commonly referred to fis-
cal science and fiscal sociology in the classical Germanic tradition. Today,
scholars—some of whom have contributed to the present special issue—
are happy to apply Cameralism to Sweden (Carl Wennerlind), Norway
(S. Reinert), Portugal (Alexandre Mendes Cunha), Hungary (Mária Hid-
végi), Finland, Italy, and Spain (Adriana Luna-Fabritius), or the natural sci-
ence discourses in general (Vera Keller, Carl Wennerlind). Reassembling
Cameralism as a cornerstone of modern political economy and the history
of modern capitalism can work from a variety of viewpoints: political his-
tory of applied Cameralism and its teachers and preachers (Eckert, Hid-
végi, Antal Szántay), a history of political ideas in context (Luna-Fabritius,Rössner / Introduction 379
Ere Nokkala, Magnusson, and Cunha), the history of economics (Xuan
Zhao), the new history of science and ideas (Keller, Wennerlind, or a more
conceptual-history-based approach that looks at how Cameralist ideas
were communicated through words, syntax, and linguistics (Tribe 2015).
Which terms were chosen, or not chosen, when describing the open human
economic future—an important ingredient to modern capitalism (Beckert
2016)—and were there changes in the usage of particular words, phrases,
terms, and syntax modeling such futures embodied within the economic
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writings of the pre-1800 period (Rössner in this issue)?
Rather than summarizing individual articles I would like to highlight
the main points I think I have learned.
Cameralism was protean, adaptable, flexible, European, and main-
stream. It could be found in some form, with modifications, in most other
academic and epistemic cultures in early modern Europe—bar England;
but in Scotland we have Sir James Steuart, whose Principles of Political
Oeconomy (1767) can be called crypto-Cameralist (Tribe 1993). There was
a common root of several European variants of Cameralist thinking in
natural law theory (see, in this issue, the articles by Ere Nokkala, Cunha,
Xuan). This serves to portray Cameralism as a bigger European project,
not a discourse peculiar or limited to Germany; it also suggests looking
further at natural law as an intellectual cornerstone of possessive individu-
alism and modern capitalism (Nokkala in this issue; Nokkala 2019).
Cameralist visions of markets and economy often started with the prince
or state. As Wilhelm von Schröder wrote in the dedication to his best-
selling Princely Treasure Chest (1684) he wanted to sketch a theory how
the state could generate money without having to overtax or “fleece” sub-
jects (like the wolf would devour sheep): this was the German-Cameralist
way to capitalism in Enlightenment and pre-Napoleonic political economy.
But as Keller (in this issue) argues, Schröder, a member of the Royal Soci-
ety, deeply engaged with late seventeenth-century English protoclassical
and proto-Enlightenment economic thought. He connected with English
natural improvement discourse and networks, and the circles of millenari-
ans who formed the foundations of what Mokyr has beautifully recon-
structed as the later Project Enlightenment (Mokyr 2017). Like Johann
Joachim Becher, Schröder partook in the epistemic revolution that had set
out to do nothing less than discover the hidden working laws of Mother
Nature, the fundamental principles: how God’s Creation had provided
mankind with the seeds of salvation through material and technological
progress, achieving infinite economic growth.380 History of Political Economy 53:3 (2021)
In order to understand this multi-faceted Project Enlightenment, of which
Cameralism represented an intrinsic component, we need to remember that
ideas traveled together with their actors, and that the means of travel mat-
tered as well, as did social networks, determining which ideas would gain
currency and which would not. Who would have believed that the Saxon
court at Gotha, peacefully secluded in Thuringia and blessed with little
tourism today, once stood much more in the center of European intellectual
efforts and attention? Being associated with a model court or state in terms
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of new visions of political and governmental efficiency at least in theory,
Wilhelm von Schröder was, as Keller writes, “elected to the Royal Society
in 1662 at the age of twenty-three, not due to any scientific achievement of
his own, but because of his connections to the Gotha court.” And as Cunha
suggests, Cameralism often spread, “despite the adoption of several of these
ideas or practices never being recognized by their recipients as an import
[my emphasis]. The promotion of a language of political governance was
specified and deepened, and its use for the conduct of reforms induced the
understanding that a certain common heritage of perspectives for action
could be shared across the world of Enlightenment.” The Marquis de Pom-
bal’s extended stay in Vienna as well as London is interesting in this con-
text; Pombal was Portugal’s great enlightened reformer and would have met
with Cameralist ideas at Vienna; Sonnenfels was the towering Cameralist
figure in Austria, as was Justi for the rest of the German-speaking lands
within the empire. Sonnenfels’s and Justi’s works were translated and trans-
mitted into Spanish and Portuguese discourses on political economy (see
Cunha and Luna-Fabritius in this issue), and the role played by courts should
not be underestimated. Sometimes ideas were shamelessly plagiarized, as
Cunha and Lluch have demonstrated with regard to the works by Bielfeld or
Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi (Justi was also an ardent auto-plagiarizer
himself). Their books often circulated under different names and in modi-
fied forms. Moreover, the role of politics and censorship also determined
what authors could and could not say (Jesuit, Inquisition); a lack of refer-
ences often makes it difficult to “follow” ideas from author to author.
Far from being either narrowly economic or a strangely Germanic
Sonderweg, Cameralism and all related writings and traditions in the
history of economic thought considered in the present issue thus provide
a new lens for looking at Project Modernity. It addresses points hitherto
underemphasized and sometimes frankly unstudied in the literature, par-
ticularly on the connection between economic and market integration and,
even more importantly, circulation (see the articles by Szántay, Hidvégi,Rössner / Introduction 381
Rössner, or Wennerlind). Early modern writers were often adamant
about the “vivacity of circulation,” a concept that went far beyond money,
monetary circulation, or the velocity of money, capturing social and eco-
nomic dynamics in a wider sense. Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi pro-
vided a full-blown theory of circulation, considering models indicating
where industry was to be located and clustered, how specialization and
value added were to be achieved, and how different industries and eco-
nomic sectors would link, correspond, and interact with each other in a
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manner that maximized the potential for prosperity and dynamic expan-
sion (see Xuan in this issue). At the time the terminus technicus used for
all this—we may call it, with only a mild dose of anachronism, “economic
development”—was happiness, or Glückseligkeit in German.
Research in economic history has shown market integration as crucial
during the process of modern state formation, as well as the formation of
national or territorial economic systems before and after industrialization
and globalization. For the Cameralists, vivacity of circulation, the estab-
lishment of functional markets, and means of exchange, and accompany-
ing regulations, were foundational in the process of state formation. Strong
rulers and well-governed states were preconditions for a flourishing capi-
talist system. But it is important to see how in the Cameralist writings this
logic worked in the reverse as well.8
Cameralism provided a new focus on the state and how its apparatus
and techniques of government could serve to make a country more civil
and prosperous (on civility and commercial society, see Hont 2005, or
Hirschman’s [2013] classic The Passions and the Interests). This included
improvement of connectivity by stimulating the circulation of money and
goods, research and scientific discovery of the state’s natural (and often
hidden) resources, and promoting credit and colonization, manufactures,
and industry and other forms of economic activity on competitive markets,
or in short: salient features of modern capitalism itself. Sometimes, as Wen-
nerlind’s study on Swedish anarcho-Cameralist Anders Pedersson Kempe
(1622–1689) shows, Cameralist writings appear even nearer to modern lib-
eral thought, proposing what almost appear as anarcho-capitalist argu-
ments that we more commonly associated with modern market radicalism
à la Murray Rothbard or Ludwig von Mises. Once again this should cau-
tion us against interpreting the intellectual history of capitalism as mono-
lithic and, more importantly, monolingual.
8. The new field of history of capitalism studies has entirely neglected Cameralism. See the
survey in Kocka 2016, or Kocka and van der Linden 2018.382 History of Political Economy 53:3 (2021)
Economic ideas and useful knowledge could be contested political
resources in the same way as they represent contested discursive
resources, as Keller demonstrates with her paper on Schröder or Eckert
in his contribution on Cameralism as a governmental technology in late
eighteenth-century Württemberg and Friedrich List. As an administrative
technique Cameralism represented a very much contested resource. Its suc-
cess was not even primarily determined by whether it provided good
knowledge and good state administration techniques; good state adminis-
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trators were those loyal to the political establishment during the reconfigu-
ration exercise that transformed Württemberg from a duchy into a kingdom
of Napoleon’s grace. Friedrich List, a Cameralist later forced to emigrate to
the US, who became known as the founding father of modern development,
was socialized within these quibbles.
Politics of integration and unification also explains one of the chosen
hinge terms, happiness. Luna-Fabritius’s paper on Francesc Romà i Ross-
ell, Spanish royal official and political writer, and his text Signs of Hap-
piness (1768) allows us to reconstruct the evolution of Spanish imperi-
alism from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. Romà i Rossell’s
work models the central role of happiness through the European discus-
sion on crisis and decadence of the Spanish imperialism in the seven-
teenth century, and the terms of its reformulation during the eighteenth
century. Moreover, it exemplifies how eighteenth-century emergent schools
of political economy were not merely economic schools or systematic dis-
ciplines, but the result of legal practices and the political and economic
agendas of the kingdoms in their complex relations with their Spanish
monarch. Happiness was the guarantee of peace and stability. In practical
economic terms it entailed productivity growth in agriculture and industry,
and the promotion of trade and circulation.
The idea of the malleable and manageable open human-economic
future, shaped by dynamic visions of agriculture, industry, circulation,
and economic development, was peculiar to the continental economic
writings of the Cameralist ilk across the mid-seventeenth to nineteenth
centuries (Rössner in this issue). There has been some debate among intel-
lectual historians and historians of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte) about
the “discoveries of the future” in early modern Europe and the intellectual
“axial age” around 1750–1850.9 This age produced fundamentally new
9. Koselleck 1994 (originally published in German in 1979) set off the debate (along with
earlier works published in German).Rössner / Introduction 383
visions of a human future; visions that were not codetermined by soterio-
logical deliberations anymore (future = Zukunft, i.e., “advent” or Second
Coming of Christ/Armageddon), but which left the human future open
and manageable, designed and shaped by conscious human effort, if only
the right analytical tools, strategies, and theories were chosen. In fact,
Wennerlind (in this issue) finds seventeenth-century Hartlibians, “attracted
by a strong conviction that the ongoing epistemic revolution had opened
up the possibility for a radically different future.” The modern way of
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looking at the economic future had manifold origins and was not a prod-
uct of the post-1750 high Enlightenment. Once again modern capitalism
was longer in the making.
Another hidden heritage has surfaced very recently. An oft-quoted
New York Times article proclaimed: “On Trade, Donald Trump Breaks
With 200 Years of Economic Orthodoxy” (Appelbaum 2016), and to the
historian the appointment of businessmen and bankers to important
offices of state under the Trump administration would smack a bit like
seventeenth-century mercantilism, where economic knowledge was habit-
ually produced by tradesmen and traders. But as Keller argues in this
issue, many Cameralists such as “Schröder wanted to do the exact oppo-
site, i.e., by reducing the power of the middlemen increase the powers of
the state in the process of generating and promoting individuals’ eco-
nomic wealth.” In many ways, seventeenth-century mercantilist thinkers
were closely in line with nineteenth and twentieth century classical liberal-
ism and Ordo-liberalism that emphasized fair play on markets, abolish-
ing market infringements such as rent seeking, monopoly, and cartels as
the best or natural economic order (see also Elmslie 2015; Grampp
1952, 1993).
Last but not least a key point is to stand up against an old standard
interpretation that mistakes Cameralism and mercantilism for chryso
hedonism, as a cult of bullion and rent seeking (e.g., Ekelund and Tollison
1981). This interpretation is known in the modern literature, following
Adam Smith, as the “Midas fallacy.” But the interpretation reached on the
basis of the following articles allows us to finally dispense with this as
the modern fallacy of the Midas fallacy. Far from rent seeking (Ekelund
and Tollison 1981) or creating Nash equilibriums (Mokyr 2009: chap. 4),
or advocating rogue protectionism and trade imperialism, mercantilism
and Cameralism developed important conceptual and analytical strategies
that paved the way toward modern enlightened capitalism.384 History of Political Economy 53:3 (2021)
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