Guilds in late medieval and early modern Western Europe provided political representation for the urban working middle classes by linking craft membership, citizenship and political participation. Historians have traditionally argued that the decline of guilds from the seventeenth century onward resulted from Enlightenment thought, free-market ideology and socio-economic processes such as deskilling and proletarianization, which shifted political rights from corporate bodies to individuals. This lecture argues that these transformations were part of a broader transformation in the rationality of governance. While policy making increasingly substituted abstrahating forms of expertise such as statistics and administrative knowledge for values such as civic virtue, the link between artisanal know-how and political status, which had long underpinned the political inclusion of artisan in the (urban) body politic, disappeared. (Bert De Munck, University of Antwerp)