| The Disordered Police State: German Cameralism as Science and Practice Probing the relationship between German political economy and everyday fiscal administration, The Disordered Police State focuses on the cameral sciences--a peculiarly German body of knowledge designed to train state officials--and in so doing offers a new vision of science and practice during the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries. Andre Wakefield shows that the cameral sciences were at once natural, technological, and economic disciplines, but, more important, they also were strategic sciences, designed to procure patronage for their authors and good publicity for the German principalities in which they lived and worked. Cameralism, then, was the public face of the prince's most secret affairs; as such, it was an essentially dishonest enterprise. Andre Wakefield is Associate Professor of History at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, and is the editor and translator, with Claudine Cohen, of the first English edition of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's Protogaea , also published by the University of Chicago Press. |