Selling visions: Kantianism, cameralism and applied science realized through encyclopaediae in Germany and beyond

Abstract

This paper explores the introduction of the term ‘applied sciences’ into English from German at the beginning of the nineteenth century. First used for, and in, The Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, a project of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the term served to describe the space between pure knowledge and practice, for a community to whom change in commerce and agriculture required elite management as well as encouragement. Addressed to those of ‘clerkly acquirements’, the audience anticipated Coleridge's later term of ‘clerisy’. I argue that we see a rather late example, on the periphery of the German cultural world in academically underserved Britain, of the importance of the encyclopaedia as a means of structuring knowledge. Mediating between an international cameralist tradition, a Kantian philosophical framework and a newly wealthy and aspirational audience, The Encyclopaedia Metropolitana was a cultural weapon through both its contents and its structure. It provided meaning to applied sciences as an epistemic category less certain than, and dependent on, the pure sciences, but also inclusive of a range of important subjects from chemistry to fortification. I argue that the term had served this role already in German, particularly after its adoption by Kantians, and moreover in encyclopaediae. In The Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, too, the categories of pure and applied science enabled the editor and readers to manage the burgeoning knowledge and destabilizing change of the early nineteenth century.