The Beginnings of Public Management: Administrative Science and Political Choices in the Eighteenth Century in France, Austria, and the Austrian Netherlands

Abstract

When can we speak of truly public “management” in Europe? Certainly not before nation-states emerged in new forms from the Congress of Vienna (1815) or before the publication of the great treatises of public finance, for example, those of Gaston d’Audiffret or Carl August Malchus. Before that time, maintaining the “royal finances” was typically done by patrimonial management of the sort that Herbert Luthy described in France, that is, by a system financially guaranteed by the royal domain and sold off to individuals.1 Inevitably, that nationwide garage sale gave way, in the aftermath of wars, to plundering the interests of the financiers and investors who had funded the conflicts. From this point of view, assignats (land-backed paper currency issued during the French Revolution) and other forms of land grants mortgaged by the sale of the national wealth during the Revolution were only a variation on the patrimonial style of management typical of the ancien regime. Still, it is important to acknowledge, within this continuum, the attempts made during the eighteenth century by various central administrations to improve the management of finances. Among these was the effort to gain a better grasp of accounting. The history of accounting is not only a history of techniques. Influenced by the ideas of Michel Foucault, the pioneers of the new history of commercial accounting pressed for a better understanding of the cultural environment of accounting logic, emancipating themselves from a strict narration of facts and the stubbornly resistant idea that innovation is ineluctable and progresses in linear fashion.2 Recent studies insist more on the socialization of commercial know-how thanks to relations among groups of