Historical Development of State Activities Cameralism.pptx

PA 501: Public Administration:
Theories, Issues and Problems
Topic 5: Historical Development of State
Activities: Mercantilism, Cameralism and
Welfare State
Prepared by
Professor Amir Mohammad Nasrullah,
PhD (Brunel, London)
Department of Public Administration
Chittagong University

Historical Development of State Activities:
Cameralism
•Meaning
•Cameralism and Public Administration
•Academic Status of Cameralism
•Cameralism in Prussia
•Cameralism in Sweden
•Who were cameralist?

Cameralism: Meaning
• The word Cameralism (German word Kameralismus) was a
German science of administration in the 18th and early 19th
centuries that aimed at strong management of a
centralized economy for mainly the state's benefit.
• The discipline in its most narrow definition concerned the
management of the state's finances.

Cameralism: Meaning
• Throughout the 18th and the first half of the 19th century,
cameralist science was influential in Northern European
states, for example, in Prussia and Sweden.
• Its academics and practitioners were pioneers in economic,
environmental and administrative knowledge and
technology, for example, cameralistic accounting, still used
in public finance today.

Cameralism in Public administration
• The growing power of centralized state control necessitated
centralized systematic information on the nation.
• A major renovation was the collection, use and interpretation of
numerical and statistical data, ranging from trade statistics, harvest
reports, and death notices to population censuses.
• Starting in the 1760s, officials in France and Germany began
increasingly to rely on quantitative data for systematic planning,
especially regarding long-term economic growth.

• It combined the utilitarian agenda of "enlightened absolutism" with
the new ideas being developed in economics. In Germany and France,
the trend was especially strong in cameralism.
• According to David F. Lindenfeld, it was divided into three:
• Cameral or public finance,
• Oeconomie and
• Polizei.
• Here Oeconomie did not exactly mean 'economics', nor
did Polizei mean 'public policy' in the modern senses.

Cameral or Cameralwissenschaft (public finance),
• Cameral -as the institutional details (e.g. how the Treasury or Central Bank
actually go about doing it). The translations are only rough definitions, the
overlap between the disciplines ambiguous. Another suggested way of
putting it is to regard Cameral- as purely "for" the State (revenues,
balancing accounts),
Polizei or Polizeiwissenschaft (administration of order)
• Polizei -is the tools (e.g. open-market operations, fiscal policy) and also
Polizei- as the implementation of policy and social order, with the State as
actor and people as passive Oeconomie (economic policy in a wider sense).
Oeconomie
• [Oeconomie - is an analogy with modern economic policy, determines the
objectives (e.g. full employment, inflation), as determining the optimal
relationship between State and society, the broader objectives of policy in
the social context (general welfare, happiness, etc.).

• Cameralism as a science is closely connected with the development
of bureaucracy in the early modern period because it was a method
aimed at increasing the efficiency of cameralists – not only referring
to the academics devoted to the science but to those employed in
the Kammer, the state administration.
• Specifically, Cameralism attributed to government three roles:
• (1) fiscal management;
• (2) exploitation of natural resources; and
• (3) economic regulation.
In due course economic regulation (Polizeisachen) came to dominate.

(1) Fiscal Management
Cameralism was most like mercantilism. Von Justi and other Cameralists
supposed that the velocity of money increased productivity. The faster
money circulated, the richer the realm would be, if this theory were true,
then the role of government is to oil this circulation by, for example,
standard coinage, guaranteed value, standard weights and measures, and
the like (Raeff, 1983).
Many Cameralists had direct experience in government. That experience
generated a practical agenda (Wakefield 1999). Unfortunately in the case of
von Justi it also meant that he made powerful enemies, ending his days in
prison (Walker, 1981), a grim outcome compared to the gilded cage despots
afforded those other philosophers who called on them to be enlightened, as
when Catherine the Great detained Denis Diderot against his will (Raeff,
1983). There is in that Plato’s twice-learned lesson from Syracuse: “Beware,
all those who would make a king into a philosopher”

(2) Exploitation of natural resources
To exploit natural resources government must learn how to make use of
productive resources. It must then find ways to convey this knowledge to its
unlettered citizens. To convince the populace to embrace this knowledge the
government must teach it that it is a matter of self-interest. Animal,
vegetable, and mineral resources must all be investigated.
(3) Economic Regulation.
Economic regulation meant, in part, that no human resources should be left
untapped. Cameralist writers like von Justi were inclined to praise middling
men. They were, according to Cameralists, more willing to work than either
the rich or the poor. They were both the stakeholders in the modern state
and its chief engineers.

• Like the Scots James Stewart, (Stewart, 1767), von Justi thought order
meant the integration of the whole.
• He wrote that: Every civil society must have good order and
coordination in all its parts: that is, the various classes of the people,
the ruling and the ruled, must stay in the right relation with respect of
one another (von Justi, 1760).
• To focus on the bourgeoisie satisfied that class and suited many a
ruler. The Prussian kings were not alone in finding their hands tied by
the feudal nobility.

• The middle class offered the kings a natural ally against the
aristocracy’s monopoly on places in government, judiciary, and
military.
• One of the principal goals of Cameralism was to bring the middle class
into government.
• In the end the sons of the traditional aristocracy was siphoned into
the military and sidelined there into parade grounds, while the
judiciary was undermined and the government concentrated on
middling men

• Cameralism was associated with the early modern term Oeconomics,
which had a broader meaning than the modern term economics as it
entailed the stewardship of households, both public, private and by
extension the state itself.
• Thus, Oeconomics was a broader domain: "...in which the
investigation of nature merged seamlessly with concerns for material
and moral well-being, in which the inter-dependence of urban and
rural productivity was appreciated and stewarded, in which
‘improvement’ was simultaneously directed toward increasing the
yields of agriculture, manufacturing and social responsibility."

• This further shaped cameralism as a wide discipline aimed at creating
an overview of knowledge needed by an enlightened administrator.
• It also illustrates that practitioners of cameralism were a
heterogeneous group that not only served the interest of the state
but also that of the growing cadres of academics, scientists and
technological experts striving for the favour of the state in order to
further their own interests as well as being Oeconomic patriots.
• There are some similarities between cameralism as an economic
theory and the French mercantilist school of Jean-Baptiste Colbert,
which has sometimes caused cameralism to be viewed as a German
version of mercantilism, as both emphasized import substitution and
a strong state-directed economic life.

• However, cameralism was developed with regard to
the landlocked nature of many of the German states of the 18th
century and attempted to substitute the whole production process,
whereas mercantilism relied on access to raw
materials and goods from the colonial periphery.
• Furthermore, defining cameralism as an early modern school of
economy does not accurately portray the scope of the body of
knowledge included in cameralism.

Academic status of Cameralism
• During the 18th century cameralism spread through the lands of
Prussia, the Holy Roman Empire and beyond. Professorial chairs in
Cameralism were also created in Sweden and Denmark–
Norway Foremost among the professors in cameralism was Johann
Heinrich Gottlob Justi (1717-1771), who linked Cameralism and the
idea of natural law with each other.
• However, most cameralists were practitioners, not academics, and
worked in the burgeoning bureaucracies sometimes supporting and
other times shunning the science.

• Whether Cameralism was a technology that was applied to the
different branches of the state and the economy decisively shaping it
or whether it was a university science has been a major debate in
modern research of Cameralism.
• Much debate has traditionally centered on exactly which writings
classify as Cameralism. However, the work of Keith Tribe, who holds
cameralism to be a university science disconnected from the actual
activities of the administrators, sparked a counter-reaction and
shifted the debate to include the practitioners of Cameralism.

• The shift is evident in the work of David Lindenfeld and Andre Wakefield,
which illustrates the dynamics between theory and practice among
cameralists.
• Although the precise legacy and nature of Cameralism remains disputed, it
has affected modern public finance, not only by shaping the formation of
state administration but also by giving rise to cameralistic accounting, a
particular system predominately used in the German public sector which
has outlived the rest of the science.
• The system has been deemed suitable for bookkeeping under conditions
posed by public enterprises or services, such as constructing and
maintaining infrastructure, and providing healthcare or education, since
these services, if paid for, constitute a form of indirect taxation rather than
a transaction on an open market.

Cameralism in Prussia
• The first academic chairs in the cameral sciences were created at the
Prussian Universities of Halle and Frankfurt under Oder, in 1727,
by Frederick William I, who perceived a need for greater
administrative skill in the growing Prussian bureaucracy.
• Cameralist teachings departed from the traditional legal and
experience-based education usually given to civil servants and
focused instead on a broad overview of classical philosophy, natural
sciences and economic practices such as husbandry, farming,
accounting, agriculture, mining, public works, administrative history,
and comparative administration, financial and commercial economics
(Parry, 1963).

• The list goes well beyond economics. Junior entry into state service
depended on passing an examination in it (Tribe 1984). Raw recruits
were to be channeled into university training courses. They would
repay the commonweal by their subsequent service.
• Cameralism contained the doctrine of selection by objective
recruitment. Its aim was to recruit, train, and retain a professional
body of administrators. Continuity in service was an important
component of its personnel management.

• However, provision of a cameralist education was also directed
towards the gentry as a way to instill the values of thrift and prudence
among landowners, thus increasing incomes from their estates.
• Prussian cameralism was focused on the state, enhancing its
efficiency and increasing its revenue through strengthening the
power of the developing bureaucracy, by means of standardisation of
both the bureaucracy’s own practices as well as the economy,
enabling greater extraction of wealth.
• There is, however, considerable debate about whether cameralist
policy reflected the stated goals of academic cameralism.

Cameralism in Sweeden
• Cameralism gained traction in Sweden after the country had lost most
of its possessions in Pomerania and the Baltic region after its defeat in
the Great Northern War. The Swedish example shows how
cameralism, as a part of the early modern concept of oeconomie,
gave rise to a wide range of activity today associated with public and
social policy.
• Around the highly developed Swedish bureaucracy coalesced a
structure of entrepreneurs, educators and scientists that strove to
mobilise the resources of the country for the betterment of the
population and strengthening of the state.

Cameralism in Sweeden
• Cameralism in this sense fostered a cadre of naturalists and
administrators serving as experts engaging in oeconomic activity, that
were not necessarily administrative officials, although, associated
with the state and utilising the well developed administration.
• In Sweden, this is exemplified by the botanist Carl Linnaeus and his
pupils, who were prominent advocates of cameralism and strove both
to cultivate foreign cash crops such as tea and the Mulberry tree, on
the leaves of which the silk worm feeds, and to find domestic
substitute for imports such as coffee, projects that even though they
were failures entrenched the role of the scientist and the expert as a
useful instrument of state interests.

Who Were the Cameralists?
Cameralist, named after the German royal treasure chamber,
the Kammer, a public administrative servant of continental rulers of the
17th and 18th centuries who was a mercantilist, propounded an extreme
form of mercantilism, concentrating even more than their confreres in the
West on building up state power, and subordinating all parts of the
economy and polity to the state and its bureaucracy.
The Cameralists were a diversity of writers who expounded and practiced
doctrines of state development, focused especially on what later came to
be called bureaucracy. They were either bureaucrats in one of the 360
tyrannical German states, or else university professors advising the princes
and their bureaucracy how best to maximize their revenue and power.

Although the roots of Cameralism can be traced back to the sixteenth
century, it reached it flower in the eighteenth century (Raeff, 1975) and its
influence stretched from Sweden in North to the Tyrol in the South and
from Switzerland in the west to Russia in the east.
It was a continental phenomenon that is now largely forgotten. The
Cameralists consisted of both practitioners and theorists. They were among
the very first self-conscious students of public administration (Small, 1909)
Some of the renowned Cameralists are:

Georg von Obrecht (1547–1612),
• The first major cameralist was Georg von Obrecht (1547–1612), son
of the mayor of Strasbourg, who went on to be a famous professor of
law at the university in that town. His lectures were published
posthumously (1617) by his son.
Christoph Besold (1577–1638),
• In the next generation, one important cameralist was Christoph
Besold (1577–1638), born in Tubingen, and later a highly influential
law professor at the University of Tubingen. Besold wrote over 90
books, all in Latin, of which the Synopsis politicae doctrinae (1623)
was the most relevant to economics.

Jakob Bornitz (1570–1630),
• Another influential cameralist of the early 17th century was Jakob
Bornitz (1570–1630), a Saxon who was the first systematizer of fiscal
policy, and who urged close supervision of industry by the state.
Kasper Klock (1584–1655),
• Another contemporary who, however, wrote later, in the middle of
the 17th century, was Kasper Klock (1584–1655), who studied law at
Marburg and Cologne and later became a bureaucrat in Bremen,
Minden, and finally in Stolberg. In 1651, Klock published the most
famous cameralist work to that date, the Tractus juridico-politico-
polemico-historicus de aerario.

Veit Ludwig von Seckendorf (1626–92),
• The most towering figure of German cameralism came shortly
thereafter. Veit Ludwig von Seckendorf (1626–92), who has been
called the father of cameralism, was born in Erlangen, and educated
in the University of Strasbourg. He went on to become a top
bureaucrat for several German states beginning with Gotha, during
which he wrote Der Teutscher Furstenstaat (1656).
• This book, a sophisticated apologia for the German absolutism of the
day, went through eight editions, and continued to be read in German
universities for over a century. Seckendorf ended his days as
chancellor at the University of Halle.

Johann Joachim Becher (1635–82)
• During the late 17th century, cameralism took firm hold in Austria.
Johann Joachim Becher (1635–82), born in Speyer and alchemist and
court physician at Mainz, soon became economic adviser to Emperor
Leopold I of Austria, and manager of various state-owned enterprises.
• Becher, who strongly influenced Austrian economic policy, called for
state-regulated trading companies for foreign trade, and a state board
of commerce to supervise all domestic economic affairs.
• A pre-Keynesian, he was deeply impressed by the "income-flow"
insight that one man's expenditure is by definition another man's
income, and he called for inflationary measures to stimulate
consumer demand. His well-known work was Politischer
Discurs (1668).

Philipp Wilhelm von Hornigk (1638–1712),
• Philipp Wilhelm von Hornigk (1638–1712), Becher's brother-in-law, was another
Mainzer who became influential in Austria. He studied at Ingolstadt, practiced law
in Vienna, and then entered the government, his Austrian chauvinist
tract, Österreich über Alles, wann es nur will (Austria Over All, If She Only
Will) (1684) proving highly popular. Von Hornigk's central theme was the
importance of making Austria self-sufficient, cut off from all trade.
Wilhelm Freiherr von Schroder (1640–88)
• A third contemporary German cameralist in Austria was Wilhelm Freiherr von
Schroder (1640–88). Born in Konigsberg and a student of law at the University of
Jena, Schroder also became influential as an adviser to Emperor Leopold I of
Austria. Schroder managed a state factory, was court financial councilor in
Hungary, and set forth his views in his Fürstliche Schatz und Rentkammer (1686).
Schroder was an extreme advocate of the divine right of princes. His cameralism
emphasized the importance of speeding the circulation of money, and of having a
banking system that could expand the supply of notes and deposits.

Johann Heinrich Gottlieb von Justi (1717–71)
• The system of cameralism was set in concrete in Germany by the mid-
18th-century by Johann Heinrich Gottlieb von Justi (1717–71). Justi
was a Thuringian who taught at Vienna and at the University of
Gottingen. He then went to Prussia to become director of mines,
superintendent of factories, and finally administrator of mines in
Berlin.
• Justi's work was the culmination of cameralism, including and
incorporating all its past tendencies, and emphasizing the importance
of comprehensive planning for a welfare state. Characteristically, Justi
emphasized the vital importance of "freedom," but freedom turned
out to be merely the opportunity to obey the edicts of the
bureaucracy.

• Justi also stressed the alleged "alienation" of the worker in a system
of factories and an advanced division of labor. Among his numerous
works, the most important were Staatswirthschaft (1755), the System
des Finanzwesens (1766), and his two-volume Die Grundfeste zu der
Macht und Glückseeligkeit der Staaten (The Groundwork of the Power
and Welfare of States) (1760–61).
• Justi, however, came a cropper on his own welfare in the welfare
state and over his own unwillingness to obey the laws of the realm.
Because of irregularities in his accounts as administrator of the
Prussian mines, Justi was thrown into jail, where he died.

Baron Joseph von Sonnenfels (1732–1817)
• The other towering figure of 18th-century German cameralism was a
follower of Justi, Baron Joseph von Sonnenfels (1732–1817). Born in
Moravia, the son of a rabbi, Sonnenfels emigrated to Vienna where he
became the first professor of finance and cameralistics, and became a
leading adviser to three successive Austro-Hungarian emperors.
• An absolutist, mercantilist, and welfare-state proponent, Sonnenfels's
views were set forth in his Grundsätze der Polizei, Handlung, und
Finanzwissenschaft (1765–67). His book, remarkably enough,
remained the official textbook of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy
until 1848.

Cameralism: The Antecedent of Bureaucracy
Cameralism had both a conservative and radical doctrine.
On the one hand, its aim was to conserve the resources of
the realm. In this it drew on the knowledge of estate
management that had underwritten the old regime.
On the other hand, it hoped to bring the German people
into step with the modern world of nation states. To do this
it looked to the factory.
That early Cameralism did not succeed in winning the day
and modernizing Germany is sign of how difficult a
reconciliation that was in the circumstances. That task
remained when faced with Napoleon’s armies.

Cameralism: The Antecedent of Bureaucracy
More specifically to the argument in hand, Cameralism concerned
politics and public administration in great and small ways.
Cameralism provided an argument for centralizing authority ever
higher at the expense of the myriad of self-governing units in German-
speaking Europe, for displacing the ancient patchwork of feudal rights,
clearing the way for functions performed by the rising new class of the
bourgeoisie.
Although Cameralism focused on economic regulation, it was political
science rather than economics (where it is usually dismissed as an
inferior version of mercantilism), for it constantly stressed political
control of the economy and the use of administration and management
to achieve that control.
And finally it interpreted government by laying down prescriptions for
its practice, anticipating a good half of Weber’s master narrative of
bureaucracy.

Historical Development of State Activities Cameralism.pptx

Historical Development of State Activities Cameralism.pptx

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