Keith Tribe's study of Cameralism, first published in 1988, is a classic of intellectual history. Now it is available again in a corrected and completely reset Second Edition. From the later seventeenth century a new post-Machiavellian discourse of wealth and welfare developed in German territorial states that directly linked the power and wealth of a ruler to the welfare of his people. The power of a ruler was related to the strength of a nation, the latter reliant on prosperous and flourishing subjects. Originally a language of counsel presented in pamphlets and books to rulers and court officials, in the early eighteenth century this language was transformed into a new university science dedicated to the idea that a flourishing state was based on principles of 'good order', and that these principles should be taught to young men in a systematic way. Governing Economy shows how distinctive this new academic discourse was in the European context, demonstrating how its focus upon 'good order' dictated the reception of contemporary French, English and Italian political economy.
From the 1790s the vogue for Critical Philosophy undermined the older Natural Law foundations of cameralist conceptions of state and society. German economic discourse transmuted into a new doctrine of economic order which, while still conceiving the wealth of a nation as founded upon the activity of a labouring population, now took its point of departure from the needs of an individual located in a 'civil society' that had emancipated itself from the tutelage of the state. Presenting in vivid detail a discourse on economy and polity that today seems quite idiosyncratic, Governing Economy sheds fresh light on the emergence during the early years of the nineteenth century of new conceptions of state and economy, demonstrating how novel such ideas of liberal political and economic order actually were.
- ISBN13 9780521303163
- Publish Date 26 August 1988
- Publish Status Inactive
- Out of Print 28 September 1998
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Cambridge University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 256
- Language English