The Closed Commercial State

A plan for a state that guarantees everyone work and a living by sealing its borders to trade and abolishing gold.

by Johann Gottlieb Fichte220 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Der geschlossene Handelsstaat
First published: 1800(aged 38)
Original language: German

Overview

The dedication goes to a serving minister, Carl August von Struensee, who ran Prussia's finances, and reminds him that statesmen have always let philosophers publish plans for states and then paid them little attention. Johann Gottlieb Fichte had just arrived in Berlin after losing his chair at Jena in the Atheism Dispute, and he published the book with Cotta in Tübingen in 1800, subtitled as a philosophical sketch appended to his theory of right. Its argument starts from property. A state owes every citizen a secure share of the country's work and goods, so it must plan who farms, who makes and who trades, fix prices, and keep the whole in balance. Open trade with other countries makes that impossible, since foreign buying and selling can ruin any plan; Fichte compares it to a war between buyers and sellers. So the state should close itself: withdraw gold and silver, the money that is valid everywhere, from circulation, issue a national money valid only at home, and leave foreign trade, so far as any is needed, to the government alone. Critics saw a prison rather than a commonwealth. The Hanoverian writer August Wilhelm Rehberg compared it to a great house of correction, and the publicist Friedrich Gentz called it a tyranny more complete than a pampered despot could have devised. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in his copy that Fichte's vanity had misled him. Later readers took it more seriously: the socialist Ferdinand Lassalle drew on it for a state policy for workers, and the economist Friedrich List for protective tariffs.

Key concepts

What is the state for, in this book?

To give each person what is rightfully theirs, and only then to protect them in it. Fichte sets this against the common view that the state simply guards whatever possessions it finds, without asking how they were acquired. Since everyone has an equal right to live from the country's work and goods, the state must first divide the available sphere of activity fairly, and in the rational state each actually receives their share.

What are world money and national money?

World money is gold and silver, which is accepted everywhere because people everywhere value it. National money (Landesgeld) is a currency that the state issues and that counts only at home, its worth secured by the state's own guarantee rather than by the metal. Withdrawing world money from circulation and issuing national money is Fichte's main practical step for cutting a country loose from the world market.

What balance must the state keep?

The balance between the estates that produce, process and exchange goods: farmers who win raw products, craftsmen who work them up, and merchants who bring them together. The state fixes how many may enter each trade, so that there is neither too much nor too little of any product, and fixes prices, so that each estate lives about as well as the others. If one trade threatens to run short of workers, the state steps in.

What does Fichte mean by the rational state?

The rational state is the state as right requires it to be, against which actual states are measured. In it, each citizen receives the share of activity and goods that is theirs by right, the trades are kept in balance, and trade with other countries is closed or held in the government's hands. Fichte's book is meant to show how an existing state could move step by step towards it.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A Living for Everyone

Does a state merely protect what people happen to own, or must it first make sure each has something? Fichte takes the second view and follows it all the way.

Most theories of right, Fichte complains, have the state guard whatever possessions it finds. He holds that its purpose is first to give each person what is theirs and only then to protect it. Property in the first instance is an exclusive right to a free activity, such as making clothes or shoes, and everyone must be able to live about as pleasantly as everyone else. So the state sets the numbers of farmers, craftsmen and merchants, fixes prices, and keeps the whole in balance.

property
property rights
labor
economic justice
rights
social contract
division of labor
economic planning
agriculture
value theory
value
wealth
poverty
state
state power
state regulation
economic regulation
exchange
political philosophy

Enter a dialogue

Closing the Borders

Can a planned economy survive next to an open world market? Fichte thinks not, and draws the conclusion that made his critics recoil.

Open trade, Fichte argues, is an endless war of all against all, between buyers and sellers, and it can wreck any plan for a fair share. The rational state must therefore close itself: first reach its natural borders, then withdraw gold and silver, the world money, and issue a national money valid only at home. Foreign trade, where any remains, belongs to the government alone. He grants exceptions, a lasting swap of corn for wine, and world money for travel, and admits some will miss Chinese tea.

money
monetary policy
currency
international trade
foreign trade
free trade
commerce
taxation
public finance
political economy
war

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 220
distinct concepts: 345
by passages held, corpus-wide: #328

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “international trade” and “money”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 19 pairings. 95 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
international trade	money	7
economic justice	labor	5
economic justice	political philosophy	2
economic justice	property	2
economic planning	international trade	2
labor	money	2
labor	property	2
labor	property rights	2
money	property	2
political philosophy	property rights	2
economic justice	economic planning	1
economic justice	international trade	1
economic justice	property rights	1
economic planning	money	1
economic planning	property rights	1
international trade	political philosophy	1
international trade	property	1
labor	political philosophy	1
political philosophy	property	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1792 Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung)
The debut, written in weeks in Königsberg to impress Kant: a book on religion that made Fichte famous before he had a system of his own.
DE
1794 Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre (Ueber den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre oder der sogenannten Philosophie – als Einladungsschrift zu seinen Vorlesungen über diese Wissenschaft)
A manifesto before the system: the short programme Fichte printed to introduce himself to Jena, months before the first sheets of the Foundation reached his students.
DE
1794 Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre (Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre)
The first full statement of the system and his best-known treatise, begun as lecture handouts in 1794; the 1795 Outline carries its theoretical half further, and the First Introduction of 1797 starts the explanation again.
DE
1794 Some Lectures concerning the Scholar's Vocation (Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten)
Popular ethics for students, given the summer Fichte arrived at Jena in 1794, alongside the far harder Foundation.
DE
1795 Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre with respect to the Theoretical Faculty (Grundriss des Eigenthümlichen der Wissenschaftslehre)
A companion rather than a book of its own: the 1795 supplement that carries the Foundation's theoretical half on into sensation, space and time.
DE
1797 First Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre (Erste Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre)
Written for beginners: the 1797 journal essay in which Fichte, frustrated with how the Foundation had been read, began explaining his system again from first principles.
DE
1799 Streitschriften zur Denk- und Gewissensfreiheit
Gathered here from two separate publications, of 1793 and 1799, that bracket Fichte's rise to fame and his fall at Jena.
DE
1800 The Closed Commercial State (Der geschlossene Handelsstaat) you are here DE
1800 The Vocation of Man (Die Bestimmung des Menschen)
Written straight after the Atheism Dispute, in his first months in Berlin: the system retold for general readers as a first-person passage from doubt to faith.
DE
1806 The Characteristics of the Present Age (Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters)
One of three popular lecture courses Fichte published in 1806: the philosophy of history that the Addresses to the German Nation would later claim to continue.
DE
1806 The Way Towards the Blessed Life (Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben)
The summit, in Fichte's own estimate, of the popular lectures he gave in Berlin before the war: religion presented as the result of the Wissenschaftslehre, his "doctrine of science", for listeners with no philosophy.
DE
1808 Addresses to the German Nation (Reden an die deutsche Nation)
His most influential book: public lectures once more, but this time a call to a defeated nation rather than a philosophy of history or a doctrine of religion.
DE
1810 Kürzere Darstellungen der Wissenschaftslehre
A Jena beginning and a Berlin summing-up, published separately and gathered on one page, on either side of the many versions of the system Fichte kept to the lecture room.
DE
1845 Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre. Aus dem Jahre 1801 (Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre aus dem Jahre 1801)
An early Berlin reworking of the system, written in 1801 as Fichte and Schelling were drifting apart, and left among his papers.
DE

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