Adam Müller converted to Catholicism, lectured to the nobility in Dresden, worked for Metternich and served in the Austrian consular service, and spent his career constructing a political economy meant to be the opposite of the British one in every particular.
The Elements of Statecraft of 1809 takes the attack directly to Adam Smith. Political economy, Müller argues, has made the fatal error of treating the state as an aggregate of individuals pursuing private advantage, and wealth as a stock of material things measurable in money. Against this he holds that the state is a living totality — not a machine or a contract but an organism, encompassing the whole life of a people over time, including the dead and the unborn, and that a citizen is constituted by membership rather than preceding it. Wealth accordingly includes what cannot be priced: institutions, laws, custom, faith, the accumulated skill of a nation, and what he called spiritual capital.
From this he derives objections that recur in every later critique of market society. The division of labour, which Smith praised, splits people into fragments and cannot be evaluated by output alone. Money is not a neutral measure but a social relation. Free trade dissolves the particular character of a nation into a placeless commerce. The medieval estates, guilds and corporations, which liberal economics regarded as obstacles, performed a function of binding people into mutual obligation that nothing has replaced.
Historically this is one of the two great nineteenth-century German answers to British political economy — the other being List's national system — and it feeds directly into the historical school of economics, into Catholic corporatism, and into the whole conservative case that markets are corrosive of the ties they depend on. Its uglier descendants are also real: the vocabulary of organic nationhood and of a wealth that is spiritual rather than material was available to worse people later.
He is the clearest case of a general phenomenon this wave documents — the Romantic critique of Enlightenment abstraction being converted, within a generation, into a defence of the restored order that Metternich was administering.