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This book presents an important new account of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Closed Commercial State, a major early nineteenth-century development of Rousseau and Kant's political thought. Isaac Nakhimovsky shows how Fichte reformulated Rousseau's constitutional politics and radicalized the economic implications of Kant's social contract theory with his defense of the right to work. Nakhimovsky argues that Fichte's sequel to Rousseau and Kant's writings on perpetual peace represents a pivotal moment in the intellectual history of the pacification of the West. Fichte claimed that Europe could not transform itself into a peaceful federation of constitutional republics unless economic life could be disentangled from the competitive dynamics of relations between states, and he asserted that this disentanglement required transitioning to a planned and largely self-sufficient national economy, made possible by a radical monetary policy. Fichte's ideas have resurfaced with nearly every crisis of globalization from the Napoleonic wars to the present, and his book remains a uniquely systematic and complete discussion of what John Maynard Keynes later termed "national self-sufficiency." Fichte's provocative contribution to the social contract tradition reminds us, Nakhimovsky concludes, that the combination of a liberal theory of the state with an open economy and international system is a much more contingent and precarious outcome than many recent theorists have tended to assume.
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Perpetual Peace and Fichte's Theory of the State 15
Herder's Letter 15
Perpetual Peace and Power Politics 17
The Citizen of Fréjus and the Philosopher of Königsberg 22
The Citizen of Fréjus, the Philosopher of Königsberg, and the Professor at Jena 35
Toward The Closed Commercial State 61
Chapter 2: Commerce and the European Commonwealth in 1800 63
Gentz's Review 63
Perpetual Peace and The Closed Commercial State 65
Fichte's History of Commerce 74
Prussia and the Anglo-French Debate of 1800 84
Fichte's Contribution to the Debate 98
Chapter 3: R epublicanization in Theory and Practice 103
Fichte's Proposal 103
Fichte's Implementation Strategy 106
The Closed Commercial State and the Political Economy of Prussian Reform 115
Fichte's Moral Challenge Continued 126
Chapter 4: Fichte's Political Economy of the General Will 130
Hestermann's Review 130
Open Commercial State versus Closed Commercial State 134
Needs and Rights in Fichte's Theory of Property 143
The Transcendental Industrialism of The Closed Commercial State 157
Conclusion 166
Bibliography 177
Index 195
Overview
This book presents an important new account of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Closed Commercial State, a major early nineteenth-century development of Rousseau and Kant's political thought. Isaac Nakhimovsky shows how Fichte reformulated Rousseau's constitutional politics and radicalized the economic implications of Kant's social contract theory with his defense of the right to work. Nakhimovsky argues that Fichte's sequel to Rousseau and Kant's writings on perpetual peace represents a pivotal moment in the ...