was pursued by the Austrian monarch Maria Theresa and Prussia’s king Friedrich I, both of whom worked to reform legal codes in ways that would centralize authority and reflect this emerging body of thought about law and statecraft. Supported in their endeavors by absolutist rulers, cameralist thinkers articulated a vision of the relationship between the state and its subjects that reflected the impulse toward rationalism, codification, and heightened economic productivity. They promoted a broad and positive (that is, not simply prohibitive and punitive) role for the modern state by suggesting that one of the central goals of statecraft was the promotion of the commonweal (Gemeinwohl) and happiness (Glückseligkeit) among the state’s subjects. This conception of happiness bore little resemblance to Anglo-American property rights and individual freedoms being articulated at the same time. Happiness was defined in terms of collective prosperity and tranquility through state protection from public disorder. Mental equilibrium was believed to be an essential tool for maintaining order, and the power of the state was promoted by carefully maintaining this equilibrium.
Two works are particularly helpful in understanding the connection between statecraft and inner life articulated by cameralists: Johann von Justi’s Grundsätze der Policeywissenschaft, popular enough to merit three printings between 1753 and 1782, and Joseph von Sonnenfels’s Grundsätze der Staatspolicey, Handlung und Finanzwissenschaft, published in six German editions between 1769 and 1820. Justi, the influential cameralist and economist, worked in the Austrian civil service under Maria Theresa and later found work in Prussia under Friedrich I. Justi’s work on statecraft helps us understand eighteenth-century thinking about the link between the moral vulnerability of subjects and the nature of state power. What he called the effective state was defined by positive goals of promotion rather than reaction to transgressions. The state should ensure that society was well-run and orderly, so that subjects could pursue productive lives. This was not a vision of individual freedoms and rights; instead these theorists stressed collective well-being and productivity that linked the behavior of each element of society to the broader happiness of all.
According to this theory, the best state was that which promoted the health and happiness of the commonweal by assuring the health, fertility, and productivity of its subjects. Justi’s vision of statecraft was broad in its implications: “One understands statecraft as that which is demanded for the smooth functioning of civic life [bürgerliches Lebens] and therefore for the maintenance of good discipline and order among the state’s subjects.” In Justi’s mind, the key to the development of a community was agriculture, trade, and population growth. These in turn served the twin goals of the state: the health of the commonweal and the promotion of collective happiness. “One must see to it,” Justi explained, “that the state’s subjects possess abilities and attributes and maintain discipline and order such as promotes the goal of collective happiness.”53
In Justi’s view, discipline and order were dependent upon virtuous subjects. In a passage entitled “On the Moral Condition of Subjects and the Maintenance of Good Discipline and Order,” Justi emphasized the centrality of subjects’ morality to the collective well-being of the state: “It is undeniable that the more perfect the moral state of a people is, the better equipped is the state to promote happiness…. Virtue is the universal mainspring of all states, that which harnesses and directs its activities.” And because virtue was key to the collective happiness of the state and community, it fell to the police to protect and encourage virtuous behavior. “The moral condition of the people must be good,” he explained, “so that they are capable of performing their duties, which in turn draws them into collective life.”54
Since virtue was seen as the “wellspring” of such productivity, censorship was necessary—and not only censorship of books but also of speech. Justi wrote that books should be prohibited if they were “clearly against the principles of religion, against the state, and against good morals; and just as an overly stringent censorship of the sciences and the book trade is very detrimental, it is also true that unlimited freedom of the press has very damaging consequences.” On the one hand, the wealth and prosperity of the state depended on literacy, the exchange of ideas, and open intellectual borders. On the other, “censorship is necessary [and] this must apply to domestic books as well as those streaming in from other states.”55 Prussia’s 1788 press laws express this tension between the values of progress and knowledge and the dangers (particularly to happiness and equilibrium) that attended print.
There were other, less rational dangers threatening the fine balance of the commonweal, found particularly in the influence of religious heterodoxy. Justi explained that the state must be on guard that no gatherings take place that, “under the guise of religion, spread enthusiastic fantasies and introduce rude debauchery against good morals that can instigate unrest and uprisings among the people, and can finally give rise to rebellion.”56 The logic of this sentence is worth considering. Religious “enthusiasm” and “fantasies” were coupled with “rude debauchery” and “rebellion” (not an obvious pairing). How did he move from religious enthusiasm to uprisings? By linking religious enthusiasm to disorder and rebellion, Justi echoed Sonnenfels’s conviction that religious emotions, enthusiasms, and fantasies could easily result in public disorder and undermine the integrity and functioning of the state. This was in part a matter of an alternate source of authority; if subjects harbored heterodox religious beliefs (say, pietist belief in the integrity of the individual’s experience of the Bible, unmediated by external authorities), they had interior traction against the principles promoted by civil society and the state. Once again this was an admission that a crucial key to governance—the creation of productive, “happy” subjects—was, as Sonnenfels put it, beyond the reach of the law.
Justi believed that the good state should focus on the maintenance of order, productivity, and discipline. Yet his vision of the well-ordered and productive state, at least as it emerged from his descriptions of statecraft and the science of policing, was full of tensions. There were, for example, tensions between three sources of authority: religion (not to be trusted and yet to be protected), the state (desirous of power and yet careful that that power be gained through the promotion of productivity rather than repression), and civil society, expressed in terms of science and knowledge and, like religion, not always to be trusted to police itself.
Justi was concerned about “enthusiastic fantasies” and “rude debauchery,” but it is unclear whether this threat came from renegade priests preaching popular religion or from secular attacks on religion. Furthermore he imagined the consequences of enthusiasm as riots and uprisings against the authority and order of the state. The social order was also endangered by the misanthrope, who was incapable of contributing to the goal of collective well-being (Gemeinwohl). Yet what is important here are the links between the moral discipline of the individual, the harmony of collective society, and the goal of collective well-being. If such discipline and harmony also served the interests of the regent, that was all to the good, but the explicit words of Justi’s program implied that creating a productive, materially comfortable, and disciplined society outweighed all other goals. This was not a liberal vision of society, as freedom was imagined in collective rather than individual terms, and Justi was not concerned with rights or freedoms. Nor was he an advocate of democracy, a position that was consistent with his view that human nature was “imperfect” and therefore in need of external authority.57 This should not keep us from recognizing what was new about his thought. In Justi’s text the legitimacy of the state rested on its ability to promote the maintenance and well-being of all its subjects. According to this schema, the vulnerability of the state’s subjects translated into the vulnerability of social order. If the society was to promote productivity and health and not to define itself in repressive terms, then it left open the possibility that dangerous elements might emerge that would promote “enthusiastic fantasies” and disorder. This is precisely the tension expressed in Prussia’s 1788 press law; the state was obliged to promote the circulation of useful knowledge, yet this need for knowledge had to be balanced against the dangers that might ensue from mental disorder, fantasy, and flights of enthusiasm.
Sonnenfels also explored the link between
