Oldal 190 [190]
BORBÁLA ZSUZSANNA TÖRÖK
prominent of them,” the ruler.” Both cameralist writings and Staatenkunde
equated civil society with the state.!? The civil society as a well-nourished,
well-ordered and populous community had been a prominent subject of the
treatises of the Viennese professor of cameralist sciences, Joseph von Son¬
nenfels (1732-1817)."* Also in Vienna, the professor of Staatenkunde/Statistik,
Georg Holzgethan (1799-1860), described the state as “die Realisierung der
Rechts-Idee und die Beförderung der geistigen und physischen Wohles err¬
ichtete Gesellschaft”! These definitions indicate a vision of the state, of civil
society and of the welfare of both." It makes part of the general European ad¬
ministrative discourse, described by Michel Foucault, whose main application
took place in the academic instruction of future officials.” The central tenet of
this view was indeed that population constituted the “material” foundation of
the state, whose increase is indispensable both for military force and for the
provision of nourishment, the diversification of occupations, of intense trade
and commerce and eventually for the wealth of the country.
All knowledge concerning the workings of a state could principally derive
from the knowledge of Land and Leute and the peculiarities of state law. Like
cameralism, Staatenkunde regarded the political territory, its riches, its prod¬
ucts and, above all, its population as the economic foundation of rule. Statistik
described the population of a country relative to its quality, to master and
exploit and cultivate its natural environment. The utilitarian principles of im¬
provement were laid out in the textbooks of Achenwall, Schlézer and Johann
Christoph Gatterer (1727-1799), and were based on the recognition that human
welfare did not simply mean happiness and populousness, but implied the pur¬
suit of increasingly complex wants:'*
Hence enfolded another field of study for Staatenkunde, which was the subject of state law. Ibid.,
11-12.
Although Adam Smith, who had “emancipated” the civic sphere as an autonomous realm, sepa¬
rated it from the auspices of the latter. See TRIBE, Keith, Cameralism and the Sciences of State,
in M. Goldie — R. Wokler (eds.), The Cambridge history of eighteenth-century political thought,
Cambridge — New York, Cambridge University Press, 525-546.
4 Tbid., 527-529.
155 HOLZGETHAN, Georg, Theorie der Statistik, Wien, Mayer, 1829, 19.
Some historians of the sciences of state even hold cameralism and Staatenkunde as two variants
of the same discipline, see LINDENFELD, David F., The Practical Imagination: The German Sciences
of State in the Nineteenth Century, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997, 33-45.
7 FoucAULT, Michel, Governmentality, in G. Burchell, ef al. (ed.), The Foucault effect. Studies in
governmentality with two lectures by and an interview with Michel Foucault. London, Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1st ed., 1991, 87—-104.; TRIBE, Cameralism, 527.
See Tribe, Cameralism, 543.; GIERL, Martin, Geschichte als präzisierte Wissenschaft. Johann
Christoph Gatterer und die Historiographie des 18. Jahrhunderts im ganzen Umfang, Stuttgart /
Bad Cannstadt, Frommann — Holzboog, 2012, 173, 176.
* 188 ¢