The ArgumentJohann von Justi, the foremost literary cameralist of his generation, served as chief police commissioner in Göttingen between 1755 and 1757. While in Göttingen, Justi offered lectures at the university on the “œconomic, police and cameral sciences.” He also arrested vagrants, wrote on chemistry, disciplined unruly students, conducted chemical experiments, supervised the pricing of Göttingen's staple goods, engaged in a public controversy with a prominent Berlin chemist, edited and published a bi-weekly periodical (Göttingische Policey-Amts Nachrichien), and worked with the (...) university's curator to refashion the academic structure of the sciences. Taken together, these various activities reflected his broad vision for social and academic change, a vision with important implications for the form and content of the sciences. Drawing on archival material in Göttingen, on articles from thePolicey-Amts Nachrichten, and on Justi's other cameralist and chemical writings, I use his everyday experiences as a local police official to explore the meaning of his chemical work. I argue that Justi's chemistry was suffused with the cameralist dreams and ambitions of a small-town police commissioner. It is what I call police chemistry. (shrink)

This paper explores the origins of the analytical definition of simple substance, a concept whose central importance in the new chemistry of Lavoisier and his colleagues is now widely recognized. I argue that this notion derived from the practical activities of metallurgists and mineral assayers, and that the theoretical elaboration necessary for the analytical concept to be understood as relevant to chemistry was inspired by the efforts of enlightened rulers in Sweden and Germany to turn chemical science to the benefit (...) of mining—and thus of the various state treasuries. The involvement of chemically-literate mineralogists in the mining industry led them to adopt the principle that analytically-determined composition was a far more essential aspect of minerals than any mere congeries of properties. The same men who pioneered the analytical notion of simple substance also inaugurated the attempt to define a nomenclature for chemistry based exclusively on composition, as determined in the laboratory. -/- . (shrink)

In its attempt to achieve acknowledgement and support as a true science and academic discipline eighteenth-century chemistry experienced that the traditional distinction between theory and practice, respectively between science and art, was an incriminating heritage and did not longer conform to the way chemists saw themselves. In order to substitute the former, socially judging classification into theoretical science and practical art, J. G. Wallerius from Uppsala coined the term pure and applied chemistry in 1751. The idea behind this new conception (...) was that it ought to be chemistry's research aim and not the kind of work, be it manual or intellectual, which was to decide about its branches and their dignity. The change in orientation which took place during the eighteenth century, and which is symbolized by the new dichotomy “pure and applied”, led towards a revaluation of the utilitarian aspects of chemistry. Its historical roots reach back to a long and fruitful cooperation of, and interaction between chemistry and economy, which was reinforced by the Stahlian tradition in Germany and Scandinavia. Subsequently, it was its strong economic bias that helped chemistry to become institutionalized and accepted as an academic discipline distinct from the medico-pharmaceutical profession. The analysis of this change of attitudes, behaviour and institutional pattern suggests that, at least during the period of institutionalization of this particular discipline, social structures and the intrinsic scientific contents are so tightly interrelated, that any division into “internal”, cognitive developments and “external” conditions would be artificial, since they both constitute the scientific community as a context of argumentation and action. (shrink)