In recent decades intellectual history as well as political and social theory had argued, that the years around 1800 had to be considered as a period of fundamental conceptual change, in which the framework of early modern society gradually disappeard, while a new understanding of describing and constructing social order emerged. Taking this into account the study intends to illustrate - on the basis of a philosophical reconstruction of "the economic" and the empirical analysis of pyhsiocratic, conservative and romantic sources of german political discourse between 1770 and 1820 - that "economic thinking" constituted a coherent and common reference, to which political and social "languages" refered to - regardless of their different conception of social order en detail. Thus, the formation of "modern" political and social thinking evolved as "economic thinking" - a specific and in fact "unescapable" discourse of dealing with the relation between individuals, society and state, which can not be reduced solely to a "liberal" or "Smithian" social theory.