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Journal of Management History

Cameralist thought and public administration


Michael W. Spicer
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Michael W. Spicer, (1998),"Cameralist thought and public administration", Journal of Management History, Vol. 4 Iss 3 pp.
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Cameralist
Cameralist thought and public thought and
administration public
administration
Michael W. Spicer
Professor of Public Administration, Maxine Goodman Levin College of 149
Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio

While writers in American public administration often like to trace the


intellectual genesis of their field to the publication of Woodrow Wilson’s 1887
article, “The study of administration,” it is well-known that the roots of modern
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public administration thinking, as Wilson himself was the first to admit, go


much farther back in history. Important among these roots are the practices and
ideas of cameralism. Cameralism, at a practical level, refers to the development
from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century of a centralized and sophisticated
apparatus of public administration designed to serve the absolutist monarchs of
Germany and Austria. Cameralism, as a set of ideas, refers to a system of
“sciences” whose professors recorded and attempted to extend and improve
administrative practices to serve these monarchs. Such cameralists, often
former administrators themselves, sought, as Louise Sommer has observed, “to
work out a systematic account of the functioning of the various administrative
services as a basis for the training of public officials” (Sommer, 1930). These
“cameralists of the books,” as Albion Small refers to them, were “distinguished
from their contemporaries and from earlier and later theorists by constructing
a ‘science’ or group of ‘sciences’ around the central consideration of the fiscal
needs of the prince” (Small, 1909).
Cameralism is of more than simply historical interest because of its influence
upon early writers in American public administration. Frederick Mosher has
argued that “in some ways, cameralism was the principal precursor of the
development of public administration in the United States in the first half of this
century, even though it had been virtually dead in Germany and Austria for
nearly a century” (Mosher, 1968). According to Mosher, “a number of the early
American apostles of public administration training had studied in Germany
and were influenced by the earlier German experience with cameralism”
(Mosher, 1968). Certainly, Wilson wrote admiringly of Prussia where he
suggested that “administration has been most studied and most nearly
perfected” and of Frederick the Great “who, building upon the foundations laid
by his father, began to organize the public service of Prussia as in very earnest
a service of the public” (Wilson, 1887).
In light of this, it may be useful to examine the ideas of cameralism more
closely. The purpose of this article, in particular, is to examine some of the
major themes of cameralist political and social thought. Particular attention Journal of Management History,
Vol. 4 No. 3, 1998, pp. 149-159.
will be paid here to cameralist writings about the nature of the state, the value © MCB University Press, 1355-252X
Journal of of science, and the power of the executive. It is concluded here that the
Management cameralists sounded themes that continue to resonate in much of modern
History American public administration thinking, but that these themes may not be as
relevant to a constitutional republic as they were to the absolutist regimes of
4,3 Germany and Austria.
In examining cameralist thought, this paper draws heavily, although by no
150 means exclusively, from the eighteenth century writings of Johann Heinrich
Gottlob von Justi, large sections of which have been translated into English by
Albion Small (Small,1 909). Born in Thurgingia and educated in law at several
German universities, Justi was the most famous of the eighteenth century
cameralist writers. In addition to teaching cameral science at both German and
Austrian universities, he was director of mines and superintendent of glass and
steel work in Berlin and later served under Frederick the Great as administrator
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of mines. He died, perhaps ironically, serving out a prison term imposed for
irregularities in his accounts. Justi’s writings are important here because more
than most cameralists, he was attentive to the political and social context of
cameralist science. Also, as a later cameralist, writing in the Age of
Enlightment, Justi presented the principles of cameralism in a distinctly
modernist and secular vein. Indeed, Justi has been referred to by Small as the
“John Stuart Mill of the movement” (Small, 1909, p. 285).

Cameralism and mercantilism


As suggested above, a major concern of cameralist writers was the provision of
adequate revenues to government. As Small observed, they sought to determine
the answer to the question: “What programme must a wise government adopt,
in order first and foremost to be adequately supplied with ready money, and
thus able to discharge the duties of the state in their various orders of
importance?” (Small, 1909, p. 6). Justi himself confirmed the importance of these
fiscal needs when he observed that money or the “readiest means of the state”
was the “great subject-matter of cameral or finance science proper” (Small,
1909, p. 375). This emphasis on money is asserted perhaps most boldly in the
writings of an earlier cameralist writer of the seventeenth century, Wilhelm
Freyer von Schröder. Schröder observed that “a prince who has no treasure in
the chest, but plans to rely upon the good will of his subjects and lands, is
walking on stilts: for the tempers of subjects are lame dogs, with which one can
catch no particular hares” (Small, 1909, p. 144). He argued that a prince “should
have the hilt in his hand and money in his chest, whereby he may put his
demands into effect, and prostitute neither himself nor his reputation, nor be
obliged to put his subjects off with fine words, because he is unable to act from
lack of means” (Small, 1909, p. 148). “With gold and silver,” according to
Schröder, “we can work miracles” (Small, 1909, p. 148).
Key to obtaining this “gold and silver” for the state, according to cameralists,
were mercantilist policies, directed at regulating economic production and trade
so as to increase the amount of precious metals held within the state and
available, therefore, to government. Not surprisingly, cameralism has often
been associated with mercantilism. Indeed, Sommer observed that cameralism Cameralist
was “properly the German and Austrian variety of mercantilism” (Sommer, thought and
1930). Justi demonstrated his fidelity to mercantilist doctrines when he asserted public
that “the first principle of advantageous commerce with foreign nations is, that
more gold and silver shall come into the country as a result than goes administration
out.”(Small, 1909 p.349) Accordingly, Justi argued that “it must be made a fixed
rule that nothing which can be produced at home shall be imported” and that 151
“necessary measures” must be “adopted to promote production of those wares”
(Small, 1909, p. 360). Furthermore, according to Justi, “those industries must be
stimulated which will produce goods that foreign nations need” (Small, 1909,
p. 351). Also, Justi argued that mining should be encouraged since mines
“increase the treasure of the country with respect to the amount of gold and
silver which they extract from the earth” (Small, 1909, p. 360).
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However, cameralism differed from mercantilism in other countries in that its


primary aim was the consolidation of the political and administrative power of
princes. Indeed, the accumulation of precious metals was seen by the
cameralists as secondary and as instrumental to the strengthening of
centralized government power. As Small observed, “cameralism was not a
theory and practice of economics but of politics” (Small, 1909, p. 3). In this
regard, it is useful to understand that, during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, European states were frequently engaged in military conflicts with
one another. As Small observed, “the chronic condition of the European nations
during the cameralistic period was war, and the primary task of governments,
especially in Germany, was creation of readiness for war” (Small, 1909, pp. 6-7).
Cameralism emerged then, in significant part, to provide the financial means for
the political purpose of enabling nations to wage wars.

The cameralist state


What cameralists sought, therefore, through the accumulation of precious
metals was the strengthening of the power of princes over their states and
subjects. Such power, according to the cameralist writers, was to be exercised
by princes, not to advance their own selfish interests, but rather to enable them
to more effectively promote the welfare of their subjects. For Schröder, for
example, “the prosperity and welfare of the subjects is the foundation upon
which all happiness of a prince as ruler of such subjects is based” and “the
happiness of a prince is conjoined with that of his subjects” (Small, 1909, pp.
142-3). Similarly, according to Justi, “A republic or state is a unification of a
multitude of people under a supreme power, for the ultimate purpose of their
happiness” (Small, 1909, p. 317). Striking a distinctly utilitarian note, Justi
argued that “all the administrative transactions of a state must be so ordered
that by means of them the happiness of the same (i.e. of the state) shall be
promoted” (Small, 1909, p. 319).
It should be emphasized here, however, that, unlike nineteenth century
English utilitarians, the cameralists did not see states as associations of free
individuals seeking their own happiness in their own particular fashion. Rather,
Journal of states were viewed as communities of subjects organized and administered by
Management their rulers around the pursuit of common substantive interests. Justi himself
History made this quite clear when he distinguished his idea of “republics” from those
societies “which, to be sure, have a certain best, and sometimes happiness in
4,3 general, as their aim, but have never subordinated themselves to a supreme
power” (Small, 1909, p. 318). As Small observed, “the salient fact about the
152 cameralistic civic theory was its fundamental assumption of the paramount
value of the collective interests, or in other words the subordination of the
interests of the individual to the interests of the community” (Small, 1909, p. 16).
Justi’s own collectivism is openly revealed in his view that the “means” of the
state consist “not merely in all sorts of movable and immovable goods,
possessed primarily either by the subjects or by the state itself; but rather in all
talents and skill of the persons who belong to the republic” (Small, 1909, p. 372).
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It is also evident in his argument that “a republic consists of a multitude of


people, who are combined with each other, … in order with their united
energies, and under a superimposed supreme power, to promote their common
happiness” (Small, 1909, pp. 317-18). For Justi, “The merging of many wills into
a single will is the first moral ground of republics” and “those who merge their
wills must all have a common paramount purpose,” which can be no other than
“the common happiness of the whole state” (Small, 1909, p. 405). According to
Justi, when “many human beings combine their wills, and resign to this
combined will the use of their energy, … there can be no other intent than that
each identifies his own happiness with the happiness of the whole society”
(Small, 1909, p. 408).
Similarly for Joseph von Sonnenfels, an Austrian contemporary of Justi, “the
great society is the state” and its citizens are “united as members in a moral
body” such that there is “unity of ultimate purpose, unity of will, unity of force”
(Small, 1909, p. 490). In light of this, for Sonnenfels, “the best of the single
member, that is, private advantage, remains constantly subordinated” to the
“best good of the community” (Small, 1909. p. 490). Furthermore, “the separate
will of the individual” is “subordinate to the community decision” and
“individual energies … exerted in no way except that toward which the
community is devoted” (Small, 1909, p. 491).
What was clearly envisaged here, therefore, was a state, collectively planned
and organized by government for its subjects in order to promote what it
regarded as their “common happiness”. Necessary to accomplishing this, in
Justi’s view, was first a science of statecraft or “staatkunst” directed to assuring
“complete security for the community, both against external and internal
dangers,” so as “to preserve the resources of the state” (Small, 1909,
p. 328). According to Justi, “The state itself must be in such a condition that,
without fear of a stronger power, it may make use of all means and measures
which it finds necessary for its prosperity and for the happiness of the
subjects” (Small, 1909, p. 332). Second, a science of administration or
“policeywissenschaft” was required. Such a science was concerned with, as
Justi noted, “all measures in the internal affairs of the country through which
the general means … of the state may be more permanently founded and Cameralist
increased, the energies … of the state better used, and in general the happiness thought and
of the community … promoted” (Small, 1909, p. 440). public
Justi argued here that public administration or “policey” should be based
upon three principles. First, “the lands of the republic must be cultivated and administration
improved … through external cultivation” and “through increase of the
population” (Small, 1990, p. 442). Second, an “increase of the products of the 153
country and the prosperity of the sustaining system … must be promoted in
every possible way” (Small, 1909, p. 442). Finally, “care must be given to
securing among the subjects such capacities and qualities, and such discipline
and order, as are demanded by the ultimate purpose, viz., the common
happiness” (Small, 1909, p. 442).
Justi’s argument here concerning the need for the state to increase the
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population should be especially noted since it was a common theme in


cameralist writings. The importance that Justi himself attached to population is
evident in his comment that “if one should ask me whether the chief
consideration of a genuine and wise cameralist … could be expressed with a
single word and concept, I would without a moment’s hesitation cry out the
word POPULATION [author’s emphasis]” (Small, 1909, p. 477). A large
population was seen as essential on military grounds because “the true relative
defensive strength of a country depends always upon the larger population”
(Small, 1909, p. 480). According to Justi, this “larger population” was to be
secured by a variety of different measures including seeing that “food supply
and employment … are systematically made abundant”, encouraging “the
immigration of rich and talented people”, encouraging “all means of
diminishing sickness and of preventing plague”, checking “drunkenness and
other demoralizing vices”, encouraging and regulating “surgery, midwifery, and
pharmacy”, and assuring the “cleanliness of cities” (Small, 1909, p. 342-3).
Sonnenfels was equally emphatic here arguing that “the validating principle …
of every measure which is adopted for the promotion of the general happiness
is this: Does it tend to increase or decrease the population?” (Small, 1909, p. 500).
He noted, as a fundamental principle, that “the greater the number of the
people, the greater is the quantity of the resistance upon which the external
security rests” (Small, 1909, p. 502). It followed, for Sonnenfels, that a
“knowledge of population is … in all parts of public administration,
indispensable” (Small, 1909, p. 503).
The cameralists often provided very detailed recommendations showing
how these purposes of the state were to be achieved. With reference to the
internal security of the state, Justi, for example, urged “frequent visitations of
roads, forests, and suspicious houses, and the use of the militia on country roads
and at night in the streets of towns” ( Small, 1909, p. 338). He also argued that
“vagabonds of all sorts must be driven from the country” and that
“householders must be required to report the names and circumstances of the
people who lodge with them” (Small, 1909, p. 338-9). In regard to foreign trade,
according to Justi, the ruler is to “inform himself precisely about the exported
Journal of and imported wares and their aggregate values” (Small, 1909, p. 350). He is to
Management exhibit these facts in “tables drawn from the tariff and excise registers, so that
History they can be reviewed at a glance” (Small, 1909, p. 350).
Sonnenfels was similarly specific in regard to the cultivation of agricultural
4,3 land. He indicated that “means of extinguishing fires are to be provided by the
local administration; the dwellings are to be in village groups, not scattered over
154 the land, and the garden plots are to be located between the houses instead of
behind them, the barns to be separated from the houses, etc., in order that there
may be the minimum danger from fire with the maximum facility of controlling
it” (Small, 1909, p. 547). Furthermore, according to Sonnefels, “active help must
be given, e.g., lumber, building, materials, farming implements; seed must be
furnished gratuitously or at least on the easiest terms”, and “if the individual
proprietors are not in a position to do this, it must be done by the state” (Small,
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1909, p. 547). Also “unthrift” on the part of proprietors must “be checked by the
introduction of supervisors of rural management” (Small, 1909, p. 548). Finally,
Sonnenfels argued that “if a piece of land has remained uncultivated two or
three years, unless the proprietor can offer to the supervisors an adequate
excuse, it shall be declared forfeited, and transferred to someone who will
cultivate it” (Small, 1909, p. 549).
In summary, what emerges here is a vision of a state systematically
organized and administered in detail around a connected and coherent set of
specific purposes or ends. These purposes included the accumulation of
precious metals, the promotion of external and internal security, the cultivation
of agricultural and industrial resources, and the expansion of the population.
The common happiness here was viewed not abstractly but in the very specific
terms of a militarily strong, economically prosperous, and morally virtuous
state towards which the activities of individuals must be systematically
directed. Cameralists here seemed to envisage the state as what Michael
Oakeshott has termed a “purposive association” or a “universitas”. Such an
association is, in Oakeshott’s words, “relationship in terms of the pursuit of
some common purpose, some substantive condition of things jointly to be
procured, or some common interest to be continuously satisfied” (Oakeshott,
1975, p. 114). The state here is seen as “a joint enterprise” in which a “many
becomes one on account of their common engagement and jointly seized of
complete control over the manner in which it is pursued” (Oakeshott, 1975,
p. 205). Within such a state, as Oakeshott observed, government becomes
“telocratic, the management of a purposive concern” (Oakeshott, 1975, pp. 205-6).

Cameralist faith in science


Cameralists, at least those writing in the eighteenth century, exhibited
considerable faith in the power of science to assist administrators in
accomplishing the ends of the state. Justi argued that the economic and cameral
sciences “give us precisely that insight which we most need for the purposes of
civic and social life” (Small, 1909, p. 299). “The government of republics cannot
endure without them, and there is no social institution or class or mode of life
which could do without them entirely” (Small, 1909, p. 299). For Justi, “the great Cameralist
housekeeping … of the state, in all its economic, police, and cameral thought and
institutions, rests upon coherent principles, which are derived from the nature public
of republics, and incidentally are veritable sciences” (Small, 1909, p. 301). He
argued that “the prosperity … of the trading classes, the encouragement of the administration
classes producing raw material, and the administration of the revenues of the
sovereign” should be carried out “in accordance with permanent principles and 155
methods” ( Small, 1909, p. 300).
Sonnenfels similarly exhibited his faith in the cameralistic sciences when he
observed that:
From manifold observations and experiences it is possible to refer the various rules through
which the general welfare may be maintained, to reliable fundamental principles, and to give
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them the form of a science, which is Staatwissenschaft in the most comprehensive sense; that
is, the science of maintaining the welfare of the state, the science of governing”(Small, 1909,
p. 494).
Sonnenfels was contemptuous here of practical knowledge and experience
arguing that “the mere empiricist in politics” is “as little to be regarded as a
statesman as the empiricist in the healing art is to be regarded as a
physician”(Small, 1909, p. 495). Consistent with this, cameralists stressed the
need for university training of public administrators. Justi, for example, saw it
as the “ultimate purpose” of universities to afford “ youth properly prepared in
the lower schools adequate instruction in all intelligence and science … in order
that they may some time, as servants of the state and upright citizens, render
useful services to the commonwealth, and be in a position fully to discharge
their duties” (Small, 1909, p. 299). He argued that, therefore, “it should be one of
their principal efforts to teach the economic and cameral sciences” (Small, 1909,
p. 299). Justi, like Sonnenfels, was critical of the value of practical knowledge
and experience. A merely practical public administrator, lacking training in
“governmental sciences”, according to Justi, will “never walk with secure steps”
and “at every unusual occurrence he will waver and seize upon questionable
decisions” (Small, 1909, p. 301). He believed that “there are very few positions of
responsibility in the state in which expertness in the economic and the cameral
sciences would not be the chief matter, if the duties of the position were fulfilled
and good service to the state performed” (Small, 1909, p. 299). For Justi, nothing
was “more indispensable to a state than perfect universal cameralists” (Small,
1909, p. 301).
Furthermore, Justi saw a properly balanced university faculty in the
“economic and cameralistic sciences” as providing a valuable source of
knowledge and expertise for government. He believed that this faculty should
be interdisciplinary and should include professors from such disciplines as
police and commercial science, economics and finance, politics, chemistry,
mechanics, natural science, and civil and military engineering. Justi argued that
such a faculty would be “uncommonly salutary for civic life” and that it “would
amount to an oracle which could with great advantage be called upon in many
affairs of state” (Small, 1909, p. 303).
Journal of That the later cameralists should exhibit such faith in the ability of their
Management science to improve policy and administration should hardly be surprising in
History light of their vision of the state as a purposive association. A vision of a
purposive political association, after all, would seem to presume the existence of
4,3 knowledge, scientific knowledge in the modern context, with which the actions
of subjects can be directed toward the attainment of certain concrete ends or
156 results sought by the state. Indeed, absent some sort of religious or
transcendental insight, it is difficult to see how one could possibly sustain a
belief in the viability of purposive association in a large complex social order
unless one also was prepared to argue that scientific knowledge could link
particular human actions with particular ends of the state. The cameralists’
faith in science was quite consistent, therefore, with their vision of the state as
a purposive association.
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Cameralism and executive power


As noted earlier, cameralism as a practice provided a large centralized
administrative apparatus to serve the needs of absolutist monarchs. Not
surprisingly then perhaps, cameralist writers were advocates of strong
executive power. Indeed, earlier cameralists in the sixteenth and seventeenth
century made no bones about supporting the idea of a “divine right of kings.”
According to Schröder, for example, a people “may under no pretext prescribe
laws to their prince and king” and “a prince must so conduct himself in his
government that he may be able one day to give account to God alone” (Small,
1909, p. 141).
Justi, writing in the Age of Enlightenment, did not openly assert such a
“divine right of kings”. Indeed, he sounded almost Lockean when he argued
that “God has put us in the world with equal freedom, dignity, and rights” and
that, therefore, “it is the duty and obligation of every government to limit the
natural freedom of its subjects, only in so far as the ultimate purpose of
republics requires” (Small, 1909, p. 403). He also expressed an almost
Madisonian awareness that “unlimited and great power is in its nature terrible
and dangerous” and that “every man is inclined to misuse his power” (Small,
1909, p. 432). Nonetheless, his support for unfettered and, in fact, absolutist
executive power is manifest in his belief that “the executive power … must, to
be sure, always be so sacred and so inviolate that he himself can never be
required to render such an account of his acts” (Small, 1909, p. 426). “In matters
of execution”, as Justi noted, the king “is not bound to obtain the consent of
anyone” and, as a result, he can “give to all his undertakings the utmost
swiftness, vigor, and efficiency” (Small, 1909, p. 426).
The only checks on executive power that Justi saw as appropriate were moral
ones. He argued that “a good ruler” would “distinguish his personal will from
his will as a ruler” and would “not try to make it his personal will” (Small, 1909,
p. 301). According to Justi, “a government which has unlimited power in its
hands, and can use power as it pleases, can never be good unless it moderates
this power by its own initiative” (Small, 1909, p. 431).
Consistent with this authoritarian view of the monarchy, the cameralists saw Cameralist
the role of public administration as crucial but essentially subservient. For Justi, thought and
“the wisdom and perfection of a government” consists in, among other things, public
“government by the monarch himself, through his own insight, not merely
through his ministers, and the concentration of all affairs in his strong hand” administration
(Small, 1909, p. 424). Justi argued specifically that “no officer should be allowed
to gain enough power to be dangerous to the state” (Small, 1909, p. 335). 157
Furthermore, no officer was to be intrusted with the infamous lettres de cachet
which gave government the “right” to confine citizens without trial (Small, 1909,
p. 335). Public administration, therefore, was to be powerful by virtue of the
expansive role of government but still very much under the control of the
prince.
This belief of the cameralists in a strong unfettered and centralized executive
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would seem to fit well with their vision of the state as a purposive association.
When one sees the state as legitimately engaged in the pursuit of a common and
coherent set of substantive ends, when one stresses the “merging of many wills
into a single will”, it is logical to advocate a powerful executive as the
appropriate institutional mechanism by which those ends should be
implemented. Indeed, from this point of view, a weak executive, because it
lacked the power to impose a unified will, would be seen as destructive to the
unity of the state.

Conclusions
In summary, the cameralists argued that government should be seen as
implementing a coherent set of substantive purposes for a state, that scientific
knowledge existed which could assist administrators in carrying out these
purposes, and that a strong chief executive was a necessary ingredient for the
accomplishment of such purposes. The view of politics that emerges here is a
decidedly rationalist one. The politics of the cameralists were, as Geraint Parry
has observed, a politics “orientated towards the achievement of a single end” or
“a few closely linked ends, rather than towards the harmonization of a wide
variety of ends” (Parry, 1963). The cameralists saw the study of such a politics,
to use Parry’s words, as “the study of organization, of how given ends could be
attained with the utmost economy of effort” and it was for them “a science
which, in the expertise involved in its understanding, was comparable to
mathematics” (Parry, 1963, p. 184). While the cameralists wrote at least a
century before the emergence of American public administration as a self-
conscious field of enquiry, what is striking here is the similarity between the
vision of administration advanced by the cameralists and that which has been
advanced in much of our own literature. The vision of a public administration,
driven by important public purposes, informed by social and administrative
science, and organized under the leadership of a strong political executive,
while not without its contemporary critics, seems still a very powerful one.
This vision was stated perhaps most boldly in Luther Gulick and Lyndall
Urwick’s Papers on the Science of Administration (1937), but it can still be
Journal of found, for example, in the current reinventing government movement. These
Management writers emphasize “mission-driven” as opposed to “rule-driven” government
History and claim to have discovered, from careful observation of experience in
business and public administration, a new set of universal principles for
4,3 successful administration of public agencies (Osbourne and Gaebler, 1993).
Furthermore, at the federal level of government, as James Carroll has observed
158 critically, advocates of reinventing government would seem to advocate
stronger presidential leadership over the activities of executive agencies and to
seek to limit “congressional micromanagement” (Carroll, 1995). This similarity
in visions between cameralists and modern writers should hardly be surprising.
Like cameralism, American public administration has also been very much a
product of a rationalist view of the world: one which places “a profound faith in
the powers of reason and science” and which sees “the common good as
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emerging from co-operation on common ends” (Spicer, 1995.)


The major difference between cameralist and American public
administration writers is that the latter clearly reject the type of absolutist
government central to cameralist thought. However, this raises an interesting
question as to whether or not, in fact, it is possible to have the kind of strong
purpose-driven public administration envisioned by cameralists without
absolutist government. Woodrow Wilson certainly believed so and argued
strongly that we could and should adopt the administrative ideas and
structures of absolutist governments without fear of embracing absolutism.
This is clearly stated in his argument that we can borrow the “business
methods” of the “monarchist dyed in the wool” without changing our
“republican spots” (Wilson, 1887). Friedrich Hayek, on the other hand, was far
less optimistic. He argued that in a state organized around the achievement of a
set of particular known purposes, government, in the absense of agreement on
those purposes, would inevitably become totalitarian in character (Hayek,
1944).
Whether Wilson or Hayek was correct here, it must be admitted that the
vision, originated by the cameralists, of a strong purpose-driven administration
has proven difficult, if not impossible, to achieve within our American
constitutional structure. As John Rohr and others have observed, the
Constitution, with its separation of powers, means that public administrators
must serve multiple masters and this means, in turn, that they must often serve
multiple and conflicting objectives (Rohr, 1986). This explains the difficulties
that successive presidents have experienced in attempting to use administrative
reform to increase their power over federal agencies at the expense of Congress
(Wilson, 1989). Contrary to the cameralist view of the state, our own
constitution, with its various checks on power, was designed in significant part
to frustrate the accomplishment of the substantive purposes of any particular
individual or group in the community. In light of this, while one may concede
that the cameralist vision of public administration was especially well-suited to
the needs of absolutist monarchs of Germany and Austria, it may not be so well-
suited to the needs of our constitutional republic.
References Cameralist
Carroll, J.D., “The rhetoric of reform and political reality in the National Performance Review”, thought and
Public Administration Review, Vol. 55, 1995.
Gulick, L. and Urwick, L. (Eds), Papers on the Science of Administration, Institute of Public
public
Administration, New York, 1937. administration
Hayek, F.A., The Road to Serfdom, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1944.
Mosher, F.C., Democracy and the Public Service, Oxford University Press, New York, 1968. 159
Oakeshott, M., On Human Conduct, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975.
Osborne, D. and Gaebler, T., Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is
Transforming the Public Sector, Penguin Books, New York, 1993; Gore, A., From Red Tape to
Results: Creating a Government that Works Better and Costs Less, US Government Printing
Office, Washington, DC, 1993.
Parry, G., “Enlightened government and its critics in eighteenth-century Germany”, The
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Historical Journal, Vol. 6, 1963.


Rohr, J.A., To Run a Constitution, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, 1986.
Small, A.W., The Cameralists: The Pioneers of German Social Polity, Burt Franklin, New York,
1909.
Sommer, L., “Cameralism”, in Singleton, E.R.A. and Johnson, A. (Eds), Encyclopaedia of the Social
Sciences: Volume 3, MacMillan Company, New York, 1930.
Spicer, M.W., The Founders, the Constitution, and Public Administration, Georgetown University
Press, Washington, DC, 1995.
Wilson, J.Q., Bureaucracy, Basic Books, New York, 1989.
Wilson, W., “The study of administration”, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 2, 1887.

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