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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 t

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.

The history of Swiss republicanism was memorably summed up by Orson Welles in the classic filmThe Third Man(1949): whereas the tumultuous and tyrannical politics of the Italian Renaissance produced a great cultural flourishing, Welles observed, "In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." Suggestive as it may be, Welles's contrast is as misleading as it is memorable. The Swiss were a fearsome military power at the beginning of the sixteenth century, admired by no less a Florentine than Niccolò Machiavelli, but by the eighteenth century they were no longer capable of defending themselves, and they were summarily occupied by the armies of revolutionary France in 1798. The nature of Swiss democracy was long contested, and in 1847 the Swiss fought a civil war over it. Finally, it must be said, cuckoo clocks were invented in the Black Forest region, on the other side of the Alps. As we shall see, the success of the Swiss watchmaking industry does in fact deserve a place in the history of liberty, but Jean-Jacques Rousseau turns out to be a more helpful guide for understanding its significance.

For many Enlightenment thinkers, discerning the relationship between commerce and peace was the central issue of modern politics. The logic of commerce seemed to require European states and empires to learn how to behave in more peaceful, self-limiting ways. However, as the fate of nations came to depend on the flux of markets, it became difficult to see how their race for prosperity could ever be fully disentangled from their struggle for power. On the contrary, it became easy to see how this entanglement could produce catastrophic results. This volume showcases the variety and the depth of approaches to economic rivalry and the rise of public finance that characterized Enlightenment discussions of international politics. It presents a fundamental reassessment of these debates about 'perpetual peace' and their legacy in the history of political thought