1st Edition
Cameralism and the Enlightenment Happiness, Governance and Reform in Transnational Perspective
Cameralism and the Enlightenment reassesses the relationship between two key phenomena of European history often disconnected from each other. It builds on recent insights from global history, transnational history and Enlightenment studies to reflect on the dynamic interactions of cameralism, an early modern set of practices and discourses of statecraft prominent in central Europe, with the broader political, intellectual and cultural developments of the Enlightenment world. Through contributions from prominent scholars across the field of Enlightenment studies, the volume analyzes eighteenth-century cameralist authors’ engagements with commerce, colonialism and natural law. Challenging the caricature of cameralism as a German, land-locked version of mercantilism, the volume reframes its importance for scholars of the Enlightenment broadly conceived.
This volume goes beyond the typical focus on Britain and France in studies of political economy, widening perspectives about the dissemination of ideas of governance, happiness and reform to focus on multidirectional exchanges across continental Europe and beyond during the eighteenth century. Emphasizing the practice of theory, it proposes the study of the porosity of ideas in their exchange, transmission and mediation between spaces and discourses as a key dimension of cultural and intellectual history.
1. Introduction
Ere Nokkala and Nicholas B. Miller
Part I: Interactions
2. On Happiness: Welfare in Cameralist Discourse in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Lars Magnusson
3. Reconciling Private Interests and the Common Good: An Essay on Cameralist Discourse
Hans-Erich Bödeker
4. A Transnational German: JHG von Justi on International Trade
Ere Nokkala
5. The International Politics of Cameralism: The Balance of Power and Dutch Translations of Justi
Koen Stapelbroek
Part II: Widening Perspectives
6. Cameralism and the Politics of Populationism: Comparative Perspectives
Nicholas B. Miller
7. Towards Ecological Statehood?: Cameralism and the Human-Nature Interface in the Eighteenth Century
Richard Hölzl
Part III: Dissemination and Local Mediation
8. Cesare Beccaria as Functionary, Lecturer, Cameralist?: Interpreting Cameralism in Habsburg Lombardy
Alexandra Ortolja-Baird
9. Cameralist Ideas in Portuguese Enlightened Reformism: The Diplomat Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho and His Circuits of Intellectual Exchange
Alexandre Mendes Cunha
10. Immanuel Kant and the Enlightenment of the Cameral Sciences
Jonas Gerlings
11. Cameralism in Spain: Polizeywissenschaft and the Bourbon Reforms
Adriana Luna-Fabritius
12. What is Cameralism?
Keith Tribe
13. Cameralism in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Reform, Translations and Academic Mobility
Danila E. Raskov
14. Epilogue
Anthony J. La Vopa
Biography
Ere Nokkala is University Researcher at the University of Helsinki, Department of Philosophy, History and Art Studies.
Nicholas B. Miller is Research Fellow at the University of Lisbon, Institute of Social Sciences.