This chapter deals with the historical forerunners of modern policy analysis in Germany and their imprints on the discipline today. In the early 17th century, Germany turned into a provincial political conglomerate. In this chaotic situation, only a few German thinkers were widely recognised, while the dominant influences came from Dutch, French and British philosophers. At the same time, starting with Heidelberg in 1386, there were intensive political and legal discussions in the newly created universities, competing between the different German territories. In this situation, Aristotelian thinking as well as the concept of ‘policies’ gained importance, and a typically German doctrine of ‘cameralism’ – directed towards administration and economy – was developed, especially at Protestant universities. But in the 19th century this tradition came to an end. This chapter studies these historical developments in detail, and shows how later political thinkers took up ideas from ‘cameralism’/Polizeiwissenschaften, thereby influencing today's German policy analysis.

Introduction

In the early 17th century Germany turned into a provincial political conglomerate for several reasons. First, the trade centres moved westward to Holland and Britain. Meanwhile, the old commercial bourgeoisie of important centres such as Nuremberg, Augsburg, Cologne, and the Hanseatic cities near the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, such as Lübeck, Rostock, Danzig, Hamburg or Bremen, declined. Furthermore, the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), with its confessional split, led to a dogmatic narrowing of political thinking in Catholic as well as in Protestant areas. The ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’ – according to an old joke, neither Holy nor Roman – was now also no longer ‘German’ because it became an object of foreign interventions from France or from Sweden. Three powerful German states – namely, Brandenburg, Saxony and Bavaria – concluded secret treaties with France, which contained a clause that these states would no longer vote for an emperor from the House of Habsburg, a clause which, according to The Peace of Westphalia Treaty (1648), was close to ‘imperial treason’ (von Aretin, 1993, p 359). And last, but not least, the German language had greater difficulties than French or English in overcoming Latin as a scientific language, although Martin Luther had contributed much to create a modern German language that preferred expressions close to people's way of talking (cf von Beyme, 2009).