Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff (1626-1692) Reinert, Erik S; Schöbel, Enrico; Chaloupek, Günther ...
European journal of law and economics,
05/2005, Volume:
19, Issue:
3
Journal Article
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as territorial governments throughout Central Europe struggled to fund lavish courts and costly armies, there was a constant demand for officials who ...could generate revenue for the sovereign treasury. These officials directed silver mines, oversaw domain lands, collected taxes, supervised prison-workhouses, policed the forests, administered universities, and ran manufactories. By the end of the seventeenth century, contemporaries began to identify the members of this group as cameralists. My dissertation is about cameralists. I examine what they did, what they wrote, and how the sprawling cameralist literature related to the world of practice in the administrative bureaus and colleges of the Holy Roman Empire. I look at the everyday administration of individual institutions—universities, manufactories, prison-workhouses, mines—to get at the techniques that cameralists employed, and the theories they propounded, in their efforts to extract revenue from the population. At the University of Göttingen, for example, I show how cameralist administration mobilized professors and the sciences in the fiscal interest of the state. Elsewhere, in Celle's prison-workhouse, the unyielding logic of income and expenditure dictated much of Hanover's policy toward the poor and the insane. Farther east, in Saxony, cameralists discovered a microcosm of the ideal state in the mines and mining districts of the Erz Mountains, which were centers of concentrated science, technology, wealth and policing. Cameralism, I conclude, was not an economic doctrine or a political theory. Rather, we must understand it as an administrative technology that linked the academy to the workhouse, the university to the fisc, and the sciences to the state.
