Political Judgement between Empirical Experience and Scholarly Tradition – Engelbert Kaempfer’s Report on Persia (1684-85)

The article attempts a reconstruction of the ways in which the production of knowledge about Persia was organized by Engelbert Kaempfer in his writings. This late seventeenth century German traveler to Asia has been unfailingly commended for his critical empiricism. While this has been taken for granted in the field of natural science – Kaempfer was a famous physician and botanist – it is more difficult, when searching for the foundations of his judgement about the political system of Persia, to distinguish between experience and scholarly tradition. The article provides a survey of the information Kaempfer had to rely upon. A comparison between these sources and the report itself gives us some insight into the processes through which the production of socio-political knowledge about an alien world took place and how the encounter with the alien exercised an influence on the political judgement of a seventeenth century explorer.