In 18th century Germany, the academic establishment of scholarly concern with the phenomena of government and state was closely bound up with the history of the Prussian State University of Halle. Here we find a paradigmatic instance of the way in which the engagement with the idea of state and government itself became an integral factor in the emergence of a particular form of polity. The study is at once a study of early-modern structural change in political science against the backdrop of the history of ideas and an analysis of the university in terms of the sociology of milieu. The transformation in methodological attitudes and the political model of civic order resulting from it show up clearly in the intersection between scholarship and bureaucracy.