Fichte on Closing the Commercial State and Society

Even though Fichte’s The Closed Commercial State (1800) has received little attention in Fichte scholarship, there is no consensus among commentators on how to situate this book in the larger body of Fichte’s social and political writings. Some see this book as an addendum to Fichte’s earlier Foundation of Natural Right (1796/7), where he articulates the conditions of a just distribution of rights among free individuals. Other commentators, by contrast, take The Closed Commercial State to be a precursor to Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation (1807/8), where he is concerned with the linguistic and cultural cohesiveness of human societies rather with the rights of individuals. I propose that the gap between these two views is not unbridgeable, for Fichte did not see a clear divide between the institution of a regime of individual rights on the one hand, and national self-determination on the other.