Fichte’s Three Political Philosophies

Abstract

Abstract In Chapter 7, Fichte takes center stage. Fichte’s great contribution to the historicity of political philosophy lies in his simultaneous development of three different political philosophies that are only tenuously connected to each other: an ideal theory in his Foundations of Natural Right, a very non-ideal theory in his Closed Commercial State, and an educational theory of progress in his Characteristics of the Present Age and Addresses to the German Nation. Working from a rather high altitude, I try to show that these three political philosophies can be characterized in terms that the historian Reinhart Koselleck has given us: the Foundations as a horizon of expectation (the future made present), the Closed Commercial State as a space of experience (the past made present), and the Characteristics and Addresses as the relation of agency that connects the horizon and the space, the future and the past.