ABSTRACT
Cameralism revisited, philosophers struggling with a new science finding its way into the philosophia practica perennis, the economics of state administration (in Stein's Verwaltungslehre, for instance), even the thinking of Marx, what Schmoller and the Verein für Socialpolitik stood for in the times of Bismarckian national unification: a ‘social monarchy’ adapted to the German Sonderweg of the Gründerjahre of economic build-up, those were the features of the German criticism of classical political economy. But there was more to it: whatever qualifications the term ‘administered economics’ needs – understood differently whether prices were fixed or not, labour rules imposed by legislation or self-discipline on the part of the trade Korporationen influenced by implicit ‘protestant (pietist) ethics’, etc. – the underlying conceptual matrices played the main role in the evolution of the most fundamental issues of political economy, social politics and national concerns. 1
