Fichte's "Closed Commercial State" and the problem of perpetual peace

Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Closed Commercial State (1800) represents a key moment in the long intellectual history of European union and the pacification of the West. Often condemned as a blueprint for totalitarian dictatorship, Fichte's book used to be widely known as a seminal statement of German socialism, and its defense of a right to work has recently begun to attract the attention of theorists of distributive justice. In fact, Fichte's demand for a welfare state was part of a major discussion of how to pacify a world of independent states locked into military and economic competition. The Closed Commercial State was a distinctive synthesis of long-running, pan-European debates about the moral and political implications of the rise of modern commerce and finance. This dissertation illuminates the positions Fichte took in different aspects of these debates. Fichte's theory of the state was a variation on the constitutional theory advanced by Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyés, the premier political thinker of the French Revolution, and embraced by Immanuel Kant in his celebrated 1795 essay on Perpetual Peace. Like Sieyés and Kant, Fichte sought to improve upon Jean-Jacques Rousseau's description of constitutional government and institutionalize his Hobbesian account of popular sovereignty. However, Fichte claimed that Kant's Perpetual Peace had greatly underestimated the potential for conflict unleashed by heightened economic competition, both between and within states. The alternative peace strategy he presented in the Closed Commercial State was predicated on Sieyés's efforts to engineer a French-led restructuring of the European balance of power. It drew on widespread eighteenth-century claims that asserting state control over the monetary system would create an unprecedented opportunity to tame intensifying interstate competition, relieve mounting class conflict, and bring about the moral transformation of modern economic relations. In making this kind of proposal, as Fichte's contemporaries realized, the Closed Commercial State extended Fichte's rights theory into a critique of the discipline of political economy. From this perspective, Fichte's Closed Commercial State emerges as a pivotal attempt to reclaim the core of seventeenth-century jurisprudence from its eighteenth-century interpreters, and make it available to emerging nineteenth-century discussions of a world of competitively industrializing nation states.