Working for posterity

‘Wir arbeiten fur unsere Nachkommen!’ (We work for posterity!), exclaimed Daniel Gottfried Schreber, professor in cameral sciences from 1764 – as political oeconomy was known in the German-speaking lands at the time. Working at the University of Leipzig in Saxony, Schreber wrote this in the preface to his German translation of Anders Berch's textbook (Introduction to Household Economics, Principles of Policey Science, OEconomic and Cameral Sciences). Berch had held the first chair in cameralism established in Sweden, at the University of Uppsala (1741). In the Holy Roman Empire, such professorships had been endowed at the Prussian Enlightenment universities of Halle/Saale and Frankfurt/Oder by 1727. Berch's book, concise compared to many contemporary German works on cameralism, was quite a success. It continued to be used in Swedish university teaching until the 1830s. We know less about how well-acclaimed Berch was in Germany; but certainly Schreber, his translator, was over the moon about his Swedish cameralist colleague. As one of the lesser-known oeconomists of his time, more copycat than cameralist, Schreber made his name chiefly as a translator of Swedish books on useful things (oeconomy), and as editor of a multivolume work entitled Daniel Gottfried Schrebers Neue Cameralschriften, essentially a compendium of useful knowledge and useful things. With this he actively contributed to European's ‘culture of growth’. As did many of his fellow cameralists, Schreber oscillated comfortably yet from a modern viewpoint eclectically between various genres including political economy, oeconomy more traditionally framed – as an Aristotelian science of household management merging with early modern conceptualizations of ‘thriftiness’, botany, chemistry, metallurgy, alchemy and what German historians know as ‘popular enlightenment’ or Volksaufklarung. As part of Germany's oeconomic enlightenment, cameralism was notably dynamic, containing signature features of modern capitalist practices and thought. But it has been left out of most narratives on the making of industrialization, future and modern economic growth. The present chapter is aimed at recovering and reclaiming some conceptual bits of this lost story and introduce Begriffsgeschichte as a useful concept for a history of dynamics and managing economic change; before Chapter 3 will link Renaissance and early modern cameralist thought to broader practices and possibilities of historical economic development.

The present matters also in another regard: the temporalities of capitalism.