Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Isaac Nakhimovsky is a junior research fellow at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge.

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"In this remarkable work, Isaac Nakhimovsky breaks completely with the traditional interpretation of Fichte as a figure of the Counter-Enlightenment concerned with propagating an extreme form of Romantic nationalism. Nakhimovsky focuses instead on Fichte's most elaborate work of political theory, his Closed Commercial State, and shows that it is one of the earliest and still most attractive principled socialist alternatives to liberal capitalist democracy."--Raymond Geuss, author ofPhilosophy and Real Politics

"Astonishingly, this is the first full study of the ideas of the major political theorist Johann Gottlieb Fichte. It transforms not simply our understanding of Fichte, but of the whole of nineteenth-century German thought--we will all have to read Hegel and Marx in a new way after this book."--Richard Tuck, Harvard University

"Isaac Nakhimovsky brilliantly reveals Fichte's attempt to enlist the welfare state and economic nationalism to resolve gaps in Kant's philosophy of international peace, democratic republicanism, and cosmopolitan commerce. One need not agree that Fichte succeeded in order to appreciate the excellent scholarship and deep contemplation that Nakhimovsky brings to these important issues."--Michael Doyle, Columbia University

"Superbly researched and elegantly written, this is a truly original study of a fascinating aspect of Enlightenment political thought and economy. Nakhimovsky brilliantly illuminates Fichte as a political philosopher and the broader currents of thought--including the writings of Rousseau, Kant, and Sièyes--that shaped him. This is essential reading for all those who care about the modern intellectual history of, and continuing theoretical debates over, international relations, globalization, republicanism, and distributive justice."--Sankar Muthu, University of Chicago

"This elegant book explores how Fichte came to conceive of the closed commercial state as necessary for international peace and domestic social justice. In a dramatic narrative, Nakhimovsky offers readers new intellectual resources for understanding economic self-sufficiency. This idea has been drowned out by the siren song of globalization in recent years, but Nakhimovsky shows it might resurface, motivated by the same reasons and ideals that moved Fichte."--Russell Muirhead, Dartmouth College

"Nakhimovsky has written a lucid and highly original account of how controversies from the European Enlightenment remain central to modern debates on globalization, the welfare of populations, and international peace."--Keith Tribe, University of Sussex

"Isaac Nakhimovsky's penetrating and remarkably stimulating book is by far the best attempt to capture the force of, and the motivation behind, Johann Gottlieb Fichte's critique and amendment of Kant'sPerpetual Peace. Nakhimovsky shows why the two visions together provide a sharper definition of the political predicament we continue to face than shelves full of contemporary texts in international relations."--John Dunn, fellow of King's College, University of Cambridge

"This clear and carefully written book does an excellent job of explaining the importance and historical context of an interesting work by a major nineteenth-century philosopher. The author's knowledge of the primary text, Fichte's other texts, and the relevant secondary literature is impeccable. This book will greatly interest intellectual historians and historians of philosophy who specialize in nineteenth-century European thought."--Frederick Neuhouser, Barnard College, Columbia University

"Nakhimovsky has written an important book on the political economy of nineteenth-century Europe. The value of this lucid book is twofold: it introduces Fichte's work and his theory of political economy to an English-

Aus dem Klappentext

"In this remarkable work, Isaac Nakhimovsky breaks completely with the traditional interpretation of Fichte as a figure of the Counter-Enlightenment concerned with propagating an extreme form of Romantic nationalism. Nakhimovsky focuses instead on Fichte's most elaborate work of political theory, his Closed Commercial State, and shows that it is one of the earliest and still most attractive principled socialist alternatives to liberal capitalist democracy."--Raymond Geuss, author ofPhilosophy and Real Politics

"Astonishingly, this is the first full study of the ideas of the major political theorist Johann Gottlieb Fichte. It transforms not simply our understanding of Fichte, but of the whole of nineteenth-century German thought--we will all have to read Hegel and Marx in a new way after this book."--Richard Tuck, Harvard University

"Isaac Nakhimovsky brilliantly reveals Fichte's attempt to enlist the welfare state and economic nationalism to resolve gaps in Kant's philosophy of international peace, democratic republicanism, and cosmopolitan commerce. One need not agree that Fichte succeeded in order to appreciate the excellent scholarship and deep contemplation that Nakhimovsky brings to these important issues."--Michael Doyle, Columbia University

"Superbly researched and elegantly written, this is a truly original study of a fascinating aspect of Enlightenment political thought and economy. Nakhimovsky brilliantly illuminates Fichte as a political philosopher and the broader currents of thought--including the writings of Rousseau, Kant, and Sièyes--that shaped him. This is essential reading for all those who care about the modern intellectual history of, and continuing theoretical debates over, international relations, globalization, republicanism, and distributive justice."--Sankar Muthu, University of Chicago

"This elegant book explores how Fichte came to conceive of the closed commercial state as necessary for international peace and domestic social justice. In a dramatic narrative, Nakhimovsky offers readers new intellectual resources for understanding economic self-sufficiency. This idea has been drowned out by the siren song of globalization in recent years, but Nakhimovsky shows it might resurface, motivated by the same reasons and ideals that moved Fichte."--Russell Muirhead, Dartmouth College

"Nakhimovsky has written a lucid and highly original account of how controversies from the European Enlightenment remain central to modern debates on globalization, the welfare of populations, and international peace."--Keith Tribe, University of Sussex

"Isaac Nakhimovsky's penetrating and remarkably stimulating book is by far the best attempt to capture the force of, and the motivation behind, Johann Gottlieb Fichte's critique and amendment of Kant'sPerpetual Peace. Nakhimovsky shows why the two visions together provide a sharper definition of the political predicament we continue to face than shelves full of contemporary texts in international relations."--John Dunn, fellow of King's College, University of Cambridge

"This clear and carefully written book does an excellent job of explaining the importance and historical context of an interesting work by a major nineteenth-century philosopher. The author's knowledge of the primary text, Fichte's other texts, and the relevant secondary literature is impeccable. This book will greatly interest intellectual historians and historians of philosophy who specialize in nineteenth-century European thought."--Frederick Neuhouser, Barnard College, Columbia University

"Nakhimovsky has written an important book on the political economy of nineteenth-century Europe. The value of this lucid book is twofold: it introduces Fichte's work and his theory of political economy to an English-

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The Closed Commercial State

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments...............................................................................................ixIntroduction..................................................................................................11 Perpetual Peace and Fichte's Theory of the State............................................................15Herder's Letter...............................................................................................15Perpetual Peace and Power Politics............................................................................17The Citizen of Fréjus and the Philosopher of Königsberg.............................................22The Citizen of Fréjus, the Philosopher of Königsberg, and the Professor at Jena.....................35Toward The Closed Commercial State............................................................................612 Commerce and the European Commonwealth in 1800..............................................................63Gentz's Review................................................................................................63Perpetual Peace and The Closed Commercial State...............................................................65Fichte's History of Commerce..................................................................................74Prussia and the Anglo-French Debate of 1800...................................................................84Fichte's Contribution to the Debate...........................................................................983 republicanization in Theory and Practice....................................................................103Fichte's Proposal.............................................................................................103Fichte's Implementation Strategy..............................................................................106The Closed Commercial State and the Political Economy of Prussian Reform......................................115Fichte's Moral Challenge Continued............................................................................1264 Fichte's Political Economy of the General Will..............................................................130Hestermann's Review...........................................................................................130Open Commercial State versus Closed Commercial State..........................................................134Needs and Rights in Fichte's Theory of Property...............................................................143The Transcendental Industrialism of The Closed Commercial State...............................................157Conclusion....................................................................................................166Bibliography..................................................................................................177Index.........................................................................................................195

Chapter One

Herder's Letter

In the summer of 1792, the German writer Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) traveled to Aachen on the French border and began what became his Letters for the Advancement of Humanity, a work that appeared serially through 1797. The original draft of his eighteenth letter asked a series of penetrating questions about the political implications of the revolution unfolding in France. We shall have to see, Herder began, whether France will manage to create a republic, as it should. If France were to demonstrate that a republic could successfully be established in such a large country, this would truly represent a revolution in political theory. Herder's next set of questions was about the international environment. how would France cope with the external pressures generated by the European states system? Unfortunately, France was not an island, like Britain, or an ocean away, like America, and so could certainly expect military intervention by other European states. The success of the republican experiment would depend very much on whether France managed to meet this grave threat without allowing its new republican ideals and institutions to be deformed. Next, Herder asked, how would France fare as a "commercial state" (Handelsstaat) in the competition for international markets, and what were the implications for the success of its republican experiment, for the future of economic reform? Fortunately, Germans like himself could sit back and address this last question as a matter of pure theory, Herder wrote, because they themselves did not yet live in true commercial states. In other words, their livelihood did not depend on success in international markets.

Herder's letter indicates the problem that Fichte went on to address in The Closed Commercial State. Fichte's book represents a significant development of the insight that Kant presented in his "Idea for a Universal history with a cosmopolitan Purpose" (1784): "The problem of establishing a perfect civil constitution is subordinate to the problem of a law-governed external relationship with other states, and cannot be solved unless the latter is also solved." The challenge posed by international relations to an ideal view of politics—a preoccupation of many eighteenth-century writers—was famously and vividly described by Rousseau in his reworking of the abbé de Saint-Pierre's writings on perpetual peace:

It is not necessary to have meditated for very long on the means of perfecting any Government whatsoever to notice the perplexities and obstacles that are born less from its constitution than from its external relations; so that one is constrained to give to its security the majority of the efforts that ought to be devoted to its public order, and to consider putting it in a condition to resist others more than to make it perfect in itself. If the social order were, as is claimed, the work of reason rather than the passions, would it have taken so long to see that either too much or too little has been done for our happiness in it; that since each of us is in the civil state with his fellow citizens and in the state of nature with all the rest of the world, we have forestalled private wars only to ignite general ones, which are a thousand times more terrible; and that by uniting ourselves to several men, we really become the enemies of the human race?

This chapter shows how Fichte arrived at his approach to this problem in the context of the French revolution, as viewed from Germany.

Perpetual Peace and Power Politics

Much eighteenth-century analysis of the relationship between political communities was shaped by moral condemnation of European power politics and the regimes that conducted it. Herder's questions about the French Revolution were embedded in this kind of criticism. The European states system, the manuscript to his eighteenth letter to humanity explained, had originated in the conquest of Rome by barbaric Germanic tribes. Only "a prophet of doom" would construe this "miserable system of war and conquest" as "the sole, immovable basis" of those societies. Just as the medieval church had successfully been reformed, so too would the remnants of an outdated feudal military order. "We live at the end of the eighteenth, no longer in the eleventh, century," Herder wrote.

The stupidity of wars, both wars of religion and succession and wars of trade and ministers, will become obvious, and already is so now; innocent, industrious peoples will politely decline the duty and honor of strangling other innocent, peaceful, industrious peoples because the regent or his minister is tempted to receive a new title, a further piece of land in addition to those lands which he already cannot govern.

Herder's letter expressed the hope that an alternative to this corrupt system was ultimately possible. "so let me believe, my friend, that the mad, raging system of conquest is not the basic constitution of Europe, or at least need not be so, and also will not be so for ever. Speremus atque amemus [Let us hope and love]." In his Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind (1774), Herder had mocked Voltaire and the other eighteenth-century historians who celebrated the balance of power as the fundamental institution of the European republic of states and the great achievement of an enlightened age. Herder's ideal was a fraternal community of peoples, and he wanted nothing to do with supposedly "enlightened" notions of reason of state. The contrast is especially clear in a famous passage from the appendix to his fifty-seventh letter to humanity, dating from 1795:

Cabinets may deceive each other; political machines may be moved against each other until one blows the other to pieces. But fatherlands do not move against each other like this; they lie quietly side by side and assist each other as families do. Fatherlands against fatherlands in a bloody struggle—that is the worst barbarism of the human language.

Fichte himself developed a radical version of this moral critique of European power politics in his early writings on politics of 1793–94. The first part of his Contribution to correct the judgment of the public about the French Revolution (1793) culminated in a ferocious condemnation of the European states system. modern states were mere accidents of history. They were not genuine political communities, Fichte wrote, but resembled gatherings of various species of carnivorous animals that lived by the principle that the strong eat the weak and the weak eat the weaker. The gears of this "artificial European machine" were powered by "the miraculous trick of the subordination of ranks [Stände]." From the sovereign on down, each class oppressed its subordinates; variations in local circumstances determined whether the end result of this perverse machine was a kind of federative republic, like the German empire, or a centralized monarchy, like France. Externally, the same heartless machinery grasped blindly at hegemony, perversely exploiting the patriotic sentiments of its citizens in the process. such a world of rapacious states could hope to hold itself together only through a balance of power, but the problems of a world of despotic states were not the problems of society in the abstract. Fichte had no patience with those who claimed that, unfortunately, sovereign states were a necessary condition of social life and, therefore, that a certain degree of violence and domination could not be avoided. In Fichte's eyes, this was to justify the existence of states by pointing to the problems that states themselves were causing. As a result, Fichte was especially outraged by those who defended intervention in France in the name of the balance of power. Instead, he looked to the emancipated French people as the agent that might be able to overthrow the European states system and replace the power politics of the old regime with a perpetual peace.

Fichte's condemnation of the European states system in 1793–94 was rooted in a humanitarian vision of a cosmopolitan moral community. Ultimately, one way or another, the gears of the European machine state would grind to a halt. Individuals would be free to act as independent rational beings and reunite themselves by participating in "the sweetest commerce of humanity" (das süßeste Commerzium der Menschheit). In his wildly popular public lecture series "morality for scholars," which he delivered as a newly appointed professor at the University of Jena in the spring and summer of 1794, Fichte developed a vivid account of this kind of community. In place of the state as a soulless machine of class conflict, Fichte depicted humanity as a vast machine of mutual aid. Fichte closed his second lecture, "concerning man's vocation within society," with a description of this humanitarian ideal:

I am acquainted with few ideas, gentlemen, more sublime than this idea of the way the entire human race generally works upon itself—this ceaseless living and striving, this lively competition to give and take which is the most honorable thing in which men can participate, this universal intermeshing of countless gears, whose common mainspring is freedom, and the beautiful harmony that grows from this. everyone can say: "Whoever you may be, because you bear a human face, you are still a member of this great community. No matter how countlessly many intermediaries may be involved in the transmission—I nevertheless have an effect upon you, and you have an effect upon me. No one whose face bears the stamp of reason, no matter how roughly, exists in vain for me." "But I am unacquainted with you, as you are with me!" "still, just as it is certain that we share a common calling—to be good and to become better and better—it is equally certain that there will come a time (it may take millions or trillions of years—what is time!) when I will draw you into my sphere of influence, a time when I will benefit you too and receive benefit from you, a time when my heart will be joined with yours by the loveliest bond of all—the bond of free, mutual give and take."

The basis of society, Fichte explained in the same lecture, was the human capacity to cooperate in the mutual satisfaction of human needs. "The social drive [der gesellschaftliche Trieb]," Fichte proclaimed, "is one of man's fundamental drives." society was no more than a contractual arrangement among autonomous individuals to assist one another in fulfilling their moral duty to cultivate their moral personalities. Throughout his early works of 1793–94, Fichte argued that it was therefore an inalienable human right to participate freely in society, but that nobody could be compelled to do so. In his lecture "Concerning Man's Vocation within society," Fichte spelled out the implications of this position for his theory of the state:

You see how important it is not to confuse society as such with that particular, empirically conditioned type of society which we call "the state." Despite what a very great man has said, life in the state is not one of man's absolute aims. The state is, instead, only a means for establishing a perfect society, a means which exists only under specific circumstances. Like all those human institutions which are mere means, the state aims at abolishing itself. The goal of all government is to make government superfluous. Though the time has certainly not yet come, nor do I know how many myriads or myriads of myriads of years it may take (here we are not at all concerned with applicability in life, but only with justifying a speculative proposition), there will certainly be a point in the a priori foreordained career of the human species when all civic bonds will become superfluous. This is that point when reason, rather than strength or cunning, will be universally recognized as the highest court of appeal. I say "be recognized" because even then men will still make mistakes and injure their fellowmen thereby. All they will then require is the goodwill to allow themselves to be convinced that they have erred and, when they are convinced of this, to recant their errors and make amends for the damages. Until we have reached this point we are, speaking quite generally, not even true men.

This passage was cited in the contemporary German press as evidence of Fichte's Jacobinism, and caused him a great deal of trouble. Fichte's caveat about the indefinite timescale in which states would wither away was easily swept aside. The abbé Barruel's Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797) complained that a professor at Jena was corrupting the youth by "telling them that governments are contrary to the laws of reason and humanity" and promising them "that therefore in twenty, in fifteen, perhaps even in ten years there will be no further government in the world."

Fichte's condemnation of European power politics in 1793–94 does share some fundamental premises with arguments advanced by radical revolutionaries like Saint-Just and Robespierre. Like them, Fichte insisted on a strong opposition between society, which was rooted in the mutual satisfaction of human needs, and the political state, which had distorted society by turning it into a war machine. They also shared the view that eliminating the external pressures generated by European power politics would create the conditions for genuine community. As Saint-Just claimed in a 1793 speech to the National convention, "The enslavement of peoples originates in the complex force of governments; they made use of the same power against peoples that they had used against their enemies." Another important point of congruence was their evocation of Rousseau when making these arguments against absolute monarchy and in favor of popular sovereignty.

This vision of an escape from the states system to a fraternity of nations, from reason of state to philanthropic patriotism, was not exclusive to Fichte or the Jacobins. The eighteenth century produced many versions of this humanitarian vision, in opposition to seventeenth-century theories of natural jurisprudence that were perceived as being all too accommodating to the absolute sovereignty of European states. As the archbishop Fénelon demanded in his immensely popular epic Telemachus (1699), Europe had to dismantle its war machines and recognize the bonds of shared humanity:

Your several nations for the future will be but one, under different names and governors. Thus it is, that the just gods, who formed and love the human race, would have them united in an everlasting bond of perfect amity and concord. All mankind are but one family dispersed over the face of the whole earth. All nations are brethren, and ought to love one another as such. may shame and infamy overtake those impious wretches who seek a cruel unnatural glory, by shedding the blood of their brethren, which they ought to regard as their own.

Herder also belonged to this broadly humanitarian discourse. He defined nations as natural societies, akin to extended families, whereas machine states were monstrous "instruments of human pride." What distinguished Herder from others like Fichte and Saint-Just was his insistence that the transformation of states into nations take place on a local scale, within local cultures. Herder considered enlightened cosmopolitanism to be a facade for the worst kind of reason of state—a rather astute observation, given the disastrous results of the French attempt to realize that humanitarian vision by overturning the European states system through military force.

The Citizen of Fréjus and the Philosopher of Königsberg

Immanuel Kant's 1795 essay Perpetual Peace now holds an iconic status for many as a statement of cosmopolitan ideals. But many of its initial readers did not consider it to belong to the humanitarian discourse exemplified by Herder and the early Fichte. Kant's essay stipulated that all states had to have republican constitutions. But this demand was preceded by a blunt denial of natural sociability:

A state of peace among men living together is not the same as the state of nature, which is rather a state of war. For even if it does not involve active hostilities, it involves a constant threat of their breaking out. Thus the state of peace must be formally instituted, for a suspension of hostilities is not in itself a guarantee of peace. And unless one neighbour gives a guarantee to the other at his request (which can happen only in a lawful state), the latter may treat him as an enemy.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Closed Commercial Stateby ISAAC NAKHIMOVSKY Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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