The Disordered Police State: German Cameralism as Science and Practice (review)

Andre Wakefield frames his richly detailed study of German cameralism in the eighteenth century as a substantial and profound critique: He demonstrates how little the theoretical writings by eighteenth-century cameralists on technology, economics, and government in the principalities of the German lands had to do with actual "administrative practice in the fiscal bureaus and collegia of the Holy Roman Empire" (p. 3), and how little they had to do with actual engineering practices in mining, ironworks, husbandry, and the textile industry. Wakefield identifies the abundant scholarly literature that German cameralists produced in the eighteenth century—literature that is well-known and well-researched among historians of modern Europe and economic historians—as publicity material either for the cameralists themselves (to secure their positions) or for their princely employers (as propaganda for their practices of extolling taxes and dues). He debunks eighteenth-century cameralist authors as untrustworthy, as knowingly telling untrue stories about state economy, government, and technology, and he debunks state officials as creating a branch of university-taught knowledge (the "cameralist sciences") that constituted writing and teaching practices but failed to provide viable accounts on how cameralist theory and practice help run protoindustrial economies.

Wakefield thus relies on and extends discussions in Science and Technology Studies about the relationship between science and practice and between written accounts and actual doing, but also about science and engineering as practice and their performative and narrative dimensions. His study explains to us how—at a time of intense and contested nation-state building in the eighteenth century—writing and producing engineering knowledge was as important as actual governing.

One of the biggest strengths of Wakefield's eminently enjoyable and readable book is the clarity with which it brings crucial historical realities to life. He paints a rich picture of state practice, engineering practice, agricultural practice, writing practice, and teaching practice in the eighteenth century—a time when many of the small principalities in the German lands were still devastated from the Thirty Years' War and in desperate need of political, economic, agricultural, and technological cultivation. Historians of technology will be fascinated by the nexus that Wakefield explores between early engineering, science, economics, and state administration. He explains in detail connections between engineering training and the training of state officials, the realities of engineering practices on the European continent on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, and the beginnings of the modern nexus of engineering and state administration in Europe in the eighteenth century. Cameralism was the first institutional structure and body of knowledge to teach and study engineering knowledge in the German lands, and it coincided with the making and stabilizing of territories in the Holy Roman Empire.

Wakefield's study is empirically grounded in four case studies which deal with a diverse array of engineering fields, such as mining (including mining academies), textile manufactures, ironworks, smeltery, model farms, and forestry. It makes two important theoretical interventions. One is in regard to the "disciplinary revolution" (p. 141), as Wakefield calls it: the studies of early modern disciplining, state-building, and subject-formation in France, Prussia, and North America that eminent authors such as Michel Foucault, Norbert Elias, and Max Weber founded with their work in the twentieth century and that have become immensely influential among historians and other scholars who are interested in the beginnings of what is now called modernity. The idea of a "well-ordered police state" in the German lands in the eighteenth century came out of these studies as an often unchallenged historical reality. Wakefield doubts its existence after his close study of the theory and practice of German state-building in the age of cameralism. The disciplined and well-ordered subjects and societies that cameralists painted in their well-known works did not, in many cases, bear the slightest resemblance to historical realities.

This is related to Wakefield's other theoretical contribution. Rather than saying that academic writings by eighteenth-century cameralists did or did...