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Economy and Government

The Economic Realm

The distinction between economics and politics is insufficient, then, to define the structures of power in the contemporary financial-economic regime. Indeed, the processes of functional dedifferentiation connected to it refer back to a history of older constellations and procedures. Even during its emergence, the modern craft of government was marked by the interpenetration of both realms; and what might be termed the ‘governmentalization’ of the state since the late seventeenth century refers to the systematic integration of economic objects and principles into the practice of politics.1 After the end of the Thirty Years War, a new field of state intervention entered the frame in connection with major social and economic change – including demographic growth, an increase in agricultural production and the monetization and internationalization of the markets. Pertaining to the complex relations between territories, populations and resources, this henceforth received the title of Oeconomy or ‘political economy’. Absolutist theories of sovereignty had defined the state as a legal construction, as an autonomous and unitary source of power, and as ‘rightly ordered government’;2 in view of the state's new role, however, a separation took place between legal principles and the maxims of government. All legal formulas, ‘all supposed laws of nature that flow from borrowed theorems’, now seemed to be mere ‘chimeras of the learned’.3 The concrete, historical existence of state entities henceforth manifested itself alongside legal abstractions, assuming an objectivity evoked less by governments and laws, constitutions and dynasties, than by a range of factors and data, such as the size, character and condition of the population, forms of production and commerce, quantities of mobile and immobile goods, climate, moral constitutions, illnesses and accidents, the circulation of money, and the fertility of the land.4 The question of government was determined by the manifold relations between people and things, by social interaction as a whole; it ceased to concern merely the rule of force and potestas and came to refer to a potential or a capacity, to a specific form of power, whose early and perhaps most concise definition was provided by Leibniz: ‘regionis potentia consistit in terra, rebus, hominibus’ (‘the strength of a land is constituted by territory, things and people’).5

The category of the economic is thus connected to an extensive re-organization of governmental knowledge from the end of the seventeenth century. The concept of ‘economy’ became synonymous with a form of government operating at a specific level of reality in modern societies, one that cannot be understood in terms of laws and legal forms. Symptomatic of it were new varieties of knowledge, ranging from German cameralism to French physiocracy, which inherited older forms of mercantilism and focused on an expanding field of political empiricism. This ‘economic’ knowledge assumed a privileged position in the self-conception of state entities, distinguishing itself through its reference to a materiality in social life, in which people transacted with one another prior to appearing as legal subjects or moral persons.

One of the early systematic studies in this field, Christoph Heinrich Amthor's Project der Oeconomic in Form einer Wissenschaft (‘The project of the economic in the form of a science’) of 1716, set out the various dimensions of this new economic form of governmental knowledge. It is characterized, first, by its empirical approach. Measuring itself against the experiential sciences, it is concerned with ‘nothing but real things’ and strives for an encyclopaedic broadening of its topics – from state finances to trade, from farming to manufacture, from cattle rearing to mining. Second, the new economic science claims universal validity and can refer equally to private households and royal courts, to towns and countries, kingdoms and, ultimately, the ‘whole wide world’. Third, it focuses not only on the constitution of objects, but also on the relationships between them; in other words, it is directed at the balance of forces and modes of exchange. The object of economic science is the interaction between things and beings. Connected to this is, fourth, a specific set of aims and interests: to guarantee, via the proliferation of wealth (both of populations and of resources), the strength and ‘welfare’ of the political entity, a mutual reinforcement of state power and economic potency. Finally, economic science is inseparable from types of intervention that privilege forms of indirect government; associated with the figure of economic knowledge is a shift in the aims of political government. Just as political empiricism refers to the interdependencies of human beings and things, individuals and wealth, populations and territories, so government now means a form of intervention that, in various contexts, takes on not only a negative and restrictive role, but also and primarily a positive and stimulating one. The function of the state is not solely protective and limited to the generation of internal and external peace. Rather, its economic definition requires that it be present in all contexts, and that it capitalize on these contexts; that it ‘keep an eye’ on people's transactions and affairs and at the same time hold them in permanent ‘motion’, constantly inventing new means and techniques for the convenience of all.6 What is referred to as ‘economy’ is thus defined both by a particular thematic topos, by a mode of cognition, and by certain procedures of governmental technology.

‘Leviathan’ and ‘Oeconomica’

The copperplate frontispiece at the beginning of Amthor's work could be understood as a response, as a supplement or as a counter-image to the famous allegory of the Leviathan, the figure of the sovereign ruler in Thomas Hobbes. At any rate, the composition and the structure of both tableaux reveal characteristic differences and alternative conceptions and operations of political power. Hence, the frontispiece for the first edition of Leviathan (1651) – probably made, with Hobbes’ involvement, by Abraham Bosse – documents an ascending, vertical order recognizable as the transition from practical rule to the theory of state (fig. 1). While the panels in the lower half assemble various emblems of state and ecclesiastical power – castle and church, crown and mitre, cannon and lightning bolt of excommunication, symbols of battle and weapons of logic, battle and disputation – the towering figure in the upper half of the image appears as the allegory of Hobbes’ concept of sovereignty: the makros anthropos or homo magnus. The ‘mortal god’ of the state is portrayed as the representative of all citizens, as the personification of all legal persons, in whose name it acts and passes judgement; a constellation in which the multitudes dispersed across the land are sublated and metaphorically extinguished in the timeless fiction of the state corpus.

Figure 1:  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil (1651), frontispiece.

This prince or sovereign stands entirely beyond the rural and urban topography spread out before him, dominating these with his countenance like an immobile sun at the centre of a galaxy, while towering over the panorama symbolically. There is no interaction between the perspectival landscape image and the figure of the state behind it. This conceptual and symbolic detachment is also conveyed by the horizontal arrangement or readability of the surface of the image. The emblematic accoutrement of the figure – whose central royal crown unites the sword on the left with the bishop's mitre on the right, worldly power with the power of the church – not only repeats the title of the work set centrally below, in other words all that can be subsumed under ‘the Matter, Forme and Power of A Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil’. It also marks the theoretical pivot and moment of unity in Hobbes’ theory of sovereignty: ‘justice’ and ‘true religion’, ‘justitia’ and ‘fides’, merge in the prince's embodiment of ‘peace’.7 Hobbes’ Leviathan thus contains a transcendent convergence of ecclesiastical and earthly power; the corpus politicum and the mystical body of Christ merge in the figure of the sovereign. The Leviathan manifests the basic premise of the theory of sovereignty as political theology; the political definition of God is combined with the divine sanctioning of the state, justifying the caption at the top of the illustration from Job 41, 33: ‘Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparatur ei’(‘Upon earth there is not his like’). The Hobbesian emblem thus stands for a concise concept; it is a conceptual allegory showing the sovereign or the prince ‘in the generic universality of the concept developed by theory’.8 For Hobbes, who repeatedly cited Platonic philosophy, ‘Leasure’ was the mother of philosophy’, while the sovereign commonwealth was ‘the mother of Peace, and Leasure’.9 The frontispiece...