In his sequel to Kant’s writings on perpetual peace, The Closed Commercial State (1800), J.G. 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. He further claimed that this transformation could be achieved through a transition to a planned and largely self-sufficient national economy, made possible by radical monetary reform. Without such action, Fichte warned, the future was likely to hold centuries of mounting class conflict and cycles of intensifying imperialism and war until Europe’s “social question” was resolved and the rest of the world gained the wherewithal to end Europe’s “commercial oppression.” This paper argues that Fichte’s account of this fate, and his proposals for avoiding it, represent far less of a departure from the structure of Kant’s theory than is commonly supposed: Kant too had identified economic independence as a potentially legitimate “means of securing the rightful state,” and he memorably praised China and Japan for responding to European imperialism in this way. From this perspective, Fichte’s intensive investigation of modern finance and international trade provides us with a vivid specification of how Kant’s model could be applied to the empirical history of state formation and economic development in modern Europe.
