The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte
Isaac Nakhimovsky
Language: English
Pages: 216
ISBN: 0691148945
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
Political Extremes: A Conceptual History from Antiquity to the Present (Extremism and Democracy)
The Blackwell Companion to Major Contemporary Social Theorists (Blackwell Companions to Sociology)
An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Ideas in Context)
Justice and the Politics of Difference
Writings of Rousseau, ed. Christopher Kelly (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2005), 2:28. Rousseau also wrote a “Judgment” of Saint-Pierre’s plan, which was published posthumously in 1782. Unlike the “Constitution of Poland,” it seems not to have been known to Kant or Fichte or many of their contemporaries; see Spector, “Le Projet de paix perpétuelle,” 4–5. Fichte’s Theory of the State Perpetual Peace and Power Politics Much eighteenth-century analysis of the relationship.
(ibid., 7:93). Note Fichte’s use of “Nation” here rather than “Volk,” to refer to the contractual idea of a population united under a common judge. 43 Ibid. 44 Compare John Locke’s account of the state of nature in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 293ff. The European Commonwealth in 1800 were none—no wonder they saw themselves as one nation, and behaved as one; no wonder they mingled, traveled, engaged in business and commerce,.
The Great, the League of Armed Neutrality had pooled its naval resources in order to defend neutral free trade from English and French efforts to limit commerce with their rivals. Catherine herself had likened the federation to the abbé de Saint-Pierre’s project for perpetual peace.129 D’Hauterive and his allies made a point of emphasizing the congruence between the proposal for a revived League of Armed Neutrality and the French vision of a new kind of trading system. Their argument was laid out.
The government could make the exchange rate less favorable as time went on.13 Those who refused to exchange their specie for the new national money were free to emigrate, but they would not be permitted to liquidate their property before leaving. Emigrants would be permitted to receive interest on their property while abroad in the form of life annuities, Fichte proposed, but the property itself would revert to the closest living relatives who had not left the country.14 Fichte claimed that the.
Planification de Fichte,” in L’état commercial fermé, ed. Daniel Schulthess, 43–56 (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1980). 41 The only exception to this rule that Fichte allowed was personal savings, which were impossible to eliminate without injury, and which the state would have to take into account in its calculations. In the case of a newly reformed state, Fichte specified, this would include the case of ancien regime pensioners (Fichte, Der geschlossene Handelsstaat, Gesamtausgabe, pt. 1, 7:82–83).