(1997),"The influence of Hume on American public administration", Journal of Management History, Vol. 3 Iss 3 pp. 238-245
http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/13552529710181596
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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).
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).
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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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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