The cameralists were in some ways the management consultants of the eighteenth century. Their job was to enhance the revenues of their patrons—princes in this case, not corporations. They claimed an ability to solve practical economic problems and increase social efficiency on the basis of a science that often appeared spuriously rigorous and suspiciously trendy. And they craved the status of professionals without fully developing the disciplining and credentialing practices that would have made them into a legitimate profession. Little known today outside early modern German history, because they were largely swept away by the upheavals of the Napoleonic age, the cameralists have nonetheless figured as star players in a century's worth of economic and social thought. From Gustav Schmoller and Albion Small (a founder of American sociology) to Michel Foucault and James Scott, they loom, for good or ill, as the administrative architects of modern civil society. Insinuating their managerial expertise into a myriad of local settings, they battled guilds, reeducated farmers, replanted forests, reorganized mines, tweaked tax incentives, and devised cleverer forms of red tape. Historians such as Marc Raeff and Keith Tribe have traditionally approached the cameralists through their copious policy regulations and influential academic textbooks without examining whether their economic development schemes really worked on the ground. Mack Walker charitably described cameralism as a “baroque science,” one whose “rationality was in abstract outline seen from the top, subject to giddiness when attention moved from that to concrete detail” (German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate, 1648–1871 [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971], 145).

Andre Wakefield radicalizes Walker's polite skepticism. Writing in a chatty, cynical tone, he casts the cameralists as little more than hucksters, public relations operators who served princes only by cloaking their fiscal rapacity as stewardship of the commonweal and who, in return, sought patronage of their own careers to become powerful administrators and fashionable professors. After an introductory chapter on “bad cameralists and disordered police states” (the book's title, incidentally, negates Marc Raeff's), four substantive chapters submit the cameralists' practical efforts to critical scrutiny. Here Wakefield interweaves three methodological approaches: a focus on notable individual cameralists, attention to the academic institutions that served as bases for their propagandizing and Projektemacherei, and case studies of specific development projects that Wakefield treats “like a quality controller,” sniffing out “rotten narratives” (p. 139) and self-serving deceptions.

Chapter two focuses on Friedrich Anton von Heynitz's attempts to improve mining in Saxony, an effort that would have shown only mixed success but for the founding of the famous and influential Bergakademie at Freiberg, where, among other things, Abraham Gottlob Werner later taught Alexander von Humboldt. Chapters three and four both feature Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi, first as a policy commissioner and academic lecturer at Göttingen, then as a manager (and, in a conflict of interest, a leaseholder) of ironworks and forests in the Brandenburg Neumark. Justi's incompetence and fraud make him the real villain of the book. His failures exasperated Frederick the Great enough to have him thrown in jail, whereas Justi's previous patron, Hannover's Gerlach Adolf von Münchhausen, eager to grow Göttingen and its university, at least proved shrewd enough to exploit Justi's popularity without being taken in by his fast talk. Chapter five centers on the more earnest but still somewhat scheming promoters of the cameral academy at Lautern in the Palatinate (later relocated to Heidelberg), which at one point took on the management of a model farm and a factory workhouse. A concluding chapter enjoins us to distrust sources, such as those produced by the cameralists, that “sustain our grand narratives about science, government, and economy in the Enlightenment” (p. 144).

One does wonder if Wakefield is too cynical about the cameralists. Often he editorializes about their faults rather than letting them hang themselves in their own words. His critical stance sometimes tempts him, too, to substitute exposé for analysis. A lengthy narrative (pp. 53–68) on the upstart Göttingen textile manufacturer Johann Heinrich Grätzel seems a canonical instance of conflict between “movers and doers” and local burghers analyzed by Mack Walker, but the episode's importance to the history of cameralism remains unclear. And every time Wakefield finds that cameralists were perhaps on to something, he flinches at the last second. Provocatively, he suggests that cameral science not only borrowed from the natural sciences but was one (pp. 20, 24, 138), and yet even then casts “science” as just another means to “fill the treasury” (p. 25) or lure “Dutch investors” (p. 48).

Although Wakefield does credit Kameralwissenschaft with the ability to produce real knowledge, he devotes precious little attention to its actual disciplinary content. The chief exception—Friedrich Casimir Medicus's proposal for an ambitious course of study for a cameralist faculty at Ingolstadt (pp. 126-30 and Appendix 3, pp. 148–153)—gestures at the large number of technocratic-utilitarian higher education reform schemes whose very failure helps to explain the later triumph of the philological-humanistic research university recently chronicled by William Clark. Wakefield might have capitalized more fully on his training as a historian of science to anatomize cameralism's modes of knowledge production, even if only as a foil to broader developments such as the formation of academic disciplines, the social construction of scientific truth, and the rise of the Gelehrtenstand and the learned professions. In any event, his own call for more “research into how specific fiscal systems produced certain kinds of knowledge” (p. 24) goes largely unheeded.

After reading Wakefield's book, historians and social theorists will think twice about ascribing either too much positive or too much negative influence to intellectuals engaged in “learned intrusion into the realm of practice” (p. 111). How, though, we can best describe their activities remains something of an open question for which the German Enlightenment still harbors interesting answers.