Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg, Ueber Philipp Wilhelm von Hornick (1881)

Inama-Sternegg’s historical and bibliographical journal article reconstructs Hornick’s career to explain the political conception behind Oesterreich über Alles. Moving from publication history through biography to an assessment of economic doctrine, it presents Hornick as a statesman whose mercantilism sought national strength through productive development and political independence. Its central problem is the discrepancy between the book’s enduring authority and the obscurity of its author:

Jedenfalls verlohnt es sich der Mühe, dem sonstigen Wirken des Mannes nachzugehen und sein Hauptwerk im Zusammenhang damit zu beurtheilen.

English translation: In any case it is worth the trouble to trace the man's other activity and to judge his principal work in connection with it.

The opening traces twelve editions of the work, first published in 1684, followed by Hermann’s stylistic adaptation of 1784. This reception establishes its exceptional standing and supports the claim that Hornick helped shape Austrian economic policy into the nineteenth century. Yet transmission also produced errors: anonymity and affinities with Johann Joachim Becher encouraged mistaken attribution, while later editions and scholarship circulated inconsistent names. Inama-Sternegg uses prefaces, family connections, and manuscripts to distinguish Hornick’s writings from works merely appended to his book.

The biographical reconstruction remains explicitly tentative about his birth and death. It follows his legal education at Ingolstadt, his relationship with Becher through his sister’s marriage, his diplomatic travels with Christoph Rojas, and his later service to Cardinal Lamberg at Passau. The unpublished Passau histories and administrative writings counter the impression that Hornick simply disappeared after his economic masterpiece. His earlier polemic against French territorial claims also supplies a political context: economic reform belonged to a larger effort to secure Germany through princely cooperation and military strength.

Inama-Sternegg explains Hornick’s focus on Austria through the fragmentation of the Empire. Rival territorial courts pursued fiscal advantage and economic restrictions against one another, frustrating a common policy. Austria’s extensive hereditary lands offered the resources and political authority for an exemplary reform that might ultimately extend across Germany. Vienna thus becomes the centre of an ambitious German mercantilism, using France’s own methods against French predominance:

Die Uebertragung von Colbert's Wirthschaftspolitik auf das deutsche Reich bezw. Oesterreich war das Losungswort des deutschen Merkantilismus; mit seinen eigenen Waffen sollte des Reiches Erzfeind geschlagen werden ²).

English translation: The transfer of Colbert's economic policy to the German Empire, or respectively to Austria, was the watchword of German mercantilism; the Empire's arch-enemy was to be beaten with his own weapons.

Hornick’s distinction consequently lies less in inventing mercantilist principles than in integrating them into a coherent political programme. Against popular demands for money and prohibitions on French manufactures, he insists on developing domestic production without sacrificing consumption. Against Becher’s excessive emphasis on trade, he gives more balanced attention to the productive branches and to the systematic investigation of local resources. Against Schröder’s concentration on princely revenues, he makes national power, increased productivity, and the country’s wealth the governing ends.

Und dem ist es nun ganz entsprechend, wenn für H. immer der Grad der politischen Selbständigkeit eines Volkes das entscheidende Kriterium für den Werth seiner Wirthschaftspolitik bildet.

English translation: And it is entirely in keeping with this that for H. the degree of a people's political independence always constitutes the decisive criterion for the value of its economic policy.

Political independence is therefore the criterion that connects economic knowledge to statesmanship. Inama-Sternegg portrays Hornick as theoretically trained and practically experienced, but more concerned with a principled solution than with immediate agitation. He cautiously suggests that hostility toward Hornick’s independence from both government and commercial interests may explain his withdrawal from public economic debate. The later manuscripts preserve the same historically informed, scholarly approach to practical political questions.

The conclusion returns to attribution, rejecting Hornick’s authorship of a later cameralist essay and declining to assign him an appended military project merely because its reasoning resembles his own. Bibliographical criticism thus supports, rather than distracts from, the intellectual interpretation. The final judgment combines admiration for Hornick’s clarity with distance from the doctrine he expressed:

Hornick’s „Oesterreich über Alles“ aber wird immer der präciseste, abgeklärteste Ausdruck des deutschen Merkantilismus bleiben und als solcher von bleibendem Werthe sein für die Geschichte der Nationalökonomie — und ihrer Irrthümer.

English translation: Hornick's "Oesterreich über Alles," however, will always remain the most precise and most lucid expression of German mercantilism, and as such will be of lasting value for the history of political economy — and of its errors.

The article’s lasting relevance lies in this double perspective: Hornick’s work is both a consequential programme of national economic development and evidence for the historical limits of mercantilist reasoning.