Wilhelm, Freiherr von Schröder, 1640-1688.

Wilhelm von Schröder  (sometimes written as Schroeder, Schröter or Schrotter) was a Saxon Cameralist in Austrian service. 

His father and namesake (often confused with his son in earlier writings) had been a state official of the tiny duchy of Saxe-Gotha, serving as its chancellor 1660-1663 (thus the immediate predecessor of Seckendorff in that position).  The young Wilhelm von Schröder was educated in the Gotha gymnasium, and began studying at the University of Jena.  He interrupted his studies c. 1660, to spend a few years touring Holland and England, thus gaining direct exposure to the budding scientific revolution and Anglo-Dutch Mercantilist thought.  An intimate of Boyle and Digby, the young Schröder was elected a member of the Royal Society perhaps as early as 1662.

Schröder returned to Germany in 1663 to resume his studies at Jena.  His dissertation (1663) was a controversial (and rather Hobbesian) defense of absolutism, organized in three parts - identifying the good of the country with the good of the ruler, reducing laws, treaties and government policy to plain utility calculations, and denouncing the role of powerful ministers as encroachments on princely authority (this latter, third part, was later published separately).  Although approved by the rector of Jena, Schröder's dissertation caused a bit of a scandal.  It was suppressed by the State authorities and he was denied his degree.

 We hear little about him again until 1673, when he converted to Catholicism and entered the Austrian civil service.  Commissioned to report on the state of manufacturing to Emperor Leopold I, Schröder drew much from his observations of England and English Mercantilist thought in his dispatches.  Around 1677,  Schröder was appointed to succeed the disgraced J.J. Becher as director of the Manufacturhaus, a textile workhouse in Tabor (Bohemia), and possibly also the Kunst- und Werkhaus, a model workshop in Vienna, although the latter would not survive the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683. 

Schröder's principle Cameralist work was his Fürstliche Schatz- und Rent-Kammer (1686), to which was appended his earlier Notwendiger on money.  He did not deviate from his commitment to absolutism, although he noted that the wealth and the power of the ruler depended on the wealth and well-being of his subjects. Schröder advocated a scheme for the establishment of a central treasury, relying less on taxation and advocating instead the use of public loans and paper money.  Again drawing largely from English Mercantilism, Schroder's work is notable for its attack on guilds and emphasizing the centrality of expanded commerce and manufacturing as the key to national wealth.  He advocated the nurturing and protection of manufacturing from foreign competition (although he did not have a typical balance of trade doctrine, sensing it should be generally free, with a few exceptions). 

Schröder's last years were spent as a finance councilor in the Pressburg (Hungarian) chamber. His posthumously-published Disquisitio (1713) was an unabashed defense of divine right and royal absolutism.  

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