114 population the notion of the state as a separate, autonomous entity with its own—not merely the ruler’s—goals, interests, and needs. At the same time, this legislation was used to discipline the administrative personnel, which was thereby transformed into an obedient instrument of the government. The administrative regulations contained rules concerning regular hours of work, while establishing a rigorous service hierarchy with an inherent principle of subordination, all of which facilitated effective control of the activities of the civil servants. The “well-ordered" state administration designed to guarantee the economic maintenance of the governmental apparatus became the object of a thorough theoretical treatment by the so-called cameralists in Germany, who developed a special German variety of mercantilism. Their efforts were devoted above all to creating an effective fiscal administration. The ideal was the absolutistically administrated Polizeistaat, which would regulate all aspects of life in great detail.^®^ The cameralists’ administrative doctrine, formulated in such works as Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff’s famous Teutscher Fiirsten-Staat (Frankfurt am Main, 1656), spread far and wide outside Germany, and not least of all to Sweden, as is evident, for example, in all the Swedish treasury and chancellery ordinances issued during the seventeenth century. The absolutist theory of the cameralists also became influential in Russia, where, on the basis of Swedish examples, administrative techniques characteristic of “der wohlgeordnete Polizeistaat” were adopted. However, as Marc Raeff has pointed out, the concept of the absolutistically directed Polizeistaat was based on an internal contradiction: its goal was to stimulate and develop the productive potential of society, that is, of the subjects, and this meant emphasizing and rewarding the creative energies of individuals. On the other hand, this goal was to be achieved through royal (i.e., state) initiative, bureaucratic direction, and legislative controls, and it was not to upset social stability and political balance. This contradiction was especially accentuated in Petrine Russia, where the adoption of the cameralist administrative program led to a situation in which the country’s potential economic resources could not be mobilized, since the state’s intensified regulation and control of society impeded the development of a dynamic and expansive economy. Marc Raeff, “The Well-Ordered Police State and the Development of Modernity in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Europe: An Attempt at a Comparative Approach,” American Historical Review, 80 (1975), 1230. Kurt Zielenzinger, Die alten deutschen Kameralisten (Jena, 1914), 101. Marc Raeff, “Russia’s Autocracy and Paradoxes of Modernization," in Gerhard Oberkofler & Eleonore Zlabinger, eds., Ost-West-Begegnung in Osterreich. Festschrift jiir Eduard Winter zum 80. Geburtstag (Vienna, 1976), 276. Ibid., 278. ” 304 307 304 305 306
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