ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a broad intellectual history of cameralism in relation to other discourses. Taking the contemporary debate on the welfare state as its point of departure, the chapter analyses the concept of happiness (Glückseligkeit) in the cameralist literature from the seventeenth century to the turn of the nineteenth century. The chapter suggests that natural jurisprudence played a pivotal role in transforming cameralists’ concept of happiness into a concept that put the emphasis on rights. This appeal to rights came to function as the basis of the welfare state. Magnusson argues that later commentators trained in the Anglo-Saxon tradition have greatly underplayed the importance of the cameralists in developing the concept of welfare and the genesis of the welfare state more broadly. Enlightenment-era Scottish and German thinkers were both deeply influenced by natural jurisprudence, but drew very different conclusions from it. The chapter emphasises that, in contrast to German cameralists, Smith and the later classical school of political economy simply did not have a concern or concept of welfare. This paper thus offers a novel historical perspective for contemplating the urgent contemporary issue of the future of the welfare state.
