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 descrip