Note that this is not simply a response to National Socialism (which, Foucault points out, was in any case the rule of a party not of a state) but to the far longer history of etatism in Germany--Weimar, World War I's planned economy, Bismarck, polizei,
cameralism, and so forth.
Defined at times as the "German equivalent of mercantilism," (122)
cameralism identified the prosperity and power of the state with the wellbeing of its citizens.
To these various conceptions of power, Foucault adds "governmentality." Governmentality or "rationality of government" emerges from early-modern reflection on the arts of government, first in
cameralism and mercantilism and later in early liberalism.
Steuart's treatise, for example, enjoyed greater prestige than Smith's until 1800 in Germany because Steuart's emphasis on exchange and reciprocity, rather than labor value, rendered his ideas compatible with the tenets of
Cameralism. (15) His insistence on a statesman to anticipate and correct instabilities also corresponded to the conventional function of the police (polizei) in Germany where the market was not treated as a self-regulating entity.
The new reason of state focussed on the couple population-wealth, and both mercantilist economic analysis and
cameralism in political administration took its increase as their privileged object.
Even if those traditions blurred the idiosyncrasies of Linnaeus's work as Koerner reveals it, Koerner's argument depends nonetheless on Linnaeus's response to Enlightenment economic theories, especially
Cameralism. Several of Koerner's points also seem stretched to make Linnaeus a more coherent figure.
Just as we know that Kant, with all his submissiveness, never lost his sympathy for advanced political hopes, (2) so too does a reassessment of Jakob show a good deal of conservatism in this representative of Halle
cameralism.
Cameralism and mercantilism were possible in a society that actively opposed individualism and democracy.
The origins of this peculiarly German discipline lay in the early modern territorial state, in which
Cameralism developed as a body of writing concerned not so much with the ultimate purpose of the state as with a description of what the state actually does.
Many European textbooks further explain how European universities responded by establishing the first chairs in
cameralism (1729).
The former held that low wages and a prosperous nation are compatible, whereas the German
cameralism thought that for a nation to flourish its population had to be prosperous.
He is working on a history of the German sciences of state and
cameralism in the nineteenth century, a rubric that included agriculture and technology.