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.
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