12 - Concluding Remarks

Summary

Cameralism in Practice is marked by a deliberate effort to shift our attention away from the work of writers to the activities of those more directly concerned in the daily tasks of economic administration, whether of state properties, royal domains, forests or manufactures. The handbooks and treatises produced in the German-speaking universities of the eighteenth century direct themselves to the organisation of these economic domains, and so they have in the past often been read as in some way reflecting actual administrative activity. There are two linked problems in this. First, as a literature of pedagogy, the burgeoning field of the Kameralwissenschaften had a strongly normative cast, rather than a purely descriptive function; second, the dynamics of the production of this literature are related not primarily to the presence or absence or priority of administrative issues, but instead to the institutional demands of teaching. The substance of the Kameralwissenschaften thus lends us no direct insight into the work of administration, nor do changes in the rate of production of such texts directly indicate anything about issues of reform or reorganisation in office and treasury.

All the same, it remains true that, as a genre, the Kameralwissenschaften had a profile consistently distinct from contemporary economic literature in Britain and France, and to a lesser degree Italy. A body of writing named after the Kammer in which court officials oversaw domain economies, and originally a literature of counsel for the best conduct of such economies, in the course of the early eighteenth century this became incorporated into the teaching of universities; and while the idea that this new body of knowledge should become part of the training of state officials, this was always much more aspiration than reality. As a result, the Kameralwissenschaften claimed a relationship to administrative practice that only existed insofar as its practitioners, at least in its early years, did have some relevant administrative experience. There was certainly a link to ‘practice’, but it was more personal than discursive.