Political Order and the Ambivalence of Expertise: Count Rumford and Welfare Reform in Late Eighteenth-Century Munich

From 1784 to 1798, the military expert and natural philosopher Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, worked in Munich for Elector Karl Theodor of Bavaria on a series of reforms that demanded a careful articulation of the reformer's expertise. This case study of Rumford's welfare reforms posits that the ambivalent nature of expertise, which relies simultaneously on generally accessible and on exclusive knowledge, was already present in the conceptual framework of Rumford's mechanical experimental philosophy and that this ambivalence was visible in the performative practice of the experimenter. Gestures of revelation and concealment and of displaying and obscuring were crucial to Rumford's (temporary) success in establishing his authority in Bavaria. Challenged by local advisers, the reformer called on a newly emergent form of public. Rumford's conceptual and practical articulation of expertise thus contributed to an increasing polarization of the political order in the Bavarian capital.