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The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte

Johann Gottlieb Fichte insists that, unlike other theorists of right (Recht) who are content to offer a merely formal account of this concept, he sees part of the task of any genuine theory of right to consist in showing how the principles of this theory can be applied to the conditions of the sensible world. His The Closed Commercial State (1800) outlines the measures demanded by the application of the principles of right to the economic sphere. It must therefore be viewed as central to Fichte’s own understanding of what a fully developed theory of right would look like. It is fair to say, however, that the later text has been widely ignored at the same time as there has been a growing interest in the Foundations of Natural Right. Isaac Nakhimovsky’s well-written and insightful book represents a welcome alternative to this tendency. The book situates Fichte’s rarely discussed The Closed Commercial State within a set of debates concerning the possibility of international peace, which took place against the background of the European states system and the power politics that characterized this system. Immanuel Kant’s essay Perpetual Peace (1795) was and remains the most famous contribution to this debate. Nakhimovsky shows that Fichte also made a major contribution to this debate by locating his book within a pan-European debate concerning the moral and political implications of the rise of modern commerce and finance. Nakhimovsky’s three main claims on Fichte’s contribution are as follows: First, “The Closed Commercial State was part of Fichte’s attempt to reformulate Rousseau’s theory of popular sovereignty and constitutional government in order to accommodate the changing nature of economic activity in a ‘commercial society,’ or an increasingly postagrarian society marked by an extensive and expanding division of labor.” Secondly, Fichte was responding to a problem that had preoccupied both Rousseau and Kant, namely, “how to neutralize an unstable system of international relations whose escalating violence threatened to undermine the logic of the social contract and make it impossible to create and maintain a government of laws.” And thirdly, Fichte claimed that Europe could transform itself into a peaceful federation of constitutional republics only if “economic life could be disentangled from the competitive dynamics of relations between states,” by means of “a transition to a planned and largely selfsufficient national economy, made possible by a radical monetary policy” (2). The second and the third claims appear to be the easiest to substantiate. A review of Kant’s Perpetual Peace counts among Fichte’s earliest publications. While writing this review Fichte was already giving the lectures on natural right that formed the basis of his Foundations of Natural Right, in which he develops both a contract theory of the state, and a theory of cosmopolitan right, which includes the notion that a confederation of states constitutes a condition of the possibility of establishing lasting peace between independent states. Then in The Closed Commercial State we encounter Fichte’s attempt to further apply the concept of right and, more specifically, his theory of property as the right to be able to live from one’s labour, which he derives from his concept of right. The application of the concept of right is here seen to demand an economic independence from other states that is in large part made possible by the introduction of a new national currency. In Chapter 1, Nakhimovsky sets out to establish the first claim by presenting Fichte’s view of the independent state, which was partly shaped by Siéyes’s view of representation in a large complex society with a division of labour, as well as by what contemporaries took as Kant’s endorsement of this view. Kant’s and Siéyes’s—and ultimately Fichte’s—view of representative institutions required by a constitutional form of government are motivated by the wish to preserve the distinction Rousseau draws between sovereignty and government in the Social Contract. The theory of the state on which The Closed Commercial State is based is also said to contain a Hobbesian element which is to be found together with the republican element in Rousseau’s thought. 122 BOOK REVIEWS