Isaac Nakhimovsky
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691148946
- eISBN:
- 9781400838752
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691148946.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
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. This book shows ...
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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. This book 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. The book 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. Fichte's ideas have resurfaced with nearly every crisis of globalization from the Napoleonic wars to the present, and his book remains a uniquely systematic and complete discussion of what John Maynard Keynes later termed “national self-sufficiency.” Fichte's provocative contribution to the social contract tradition reminds us, the book concludes, that the combination of a liberal theory of the state with an open economy and international system is a much more contingent and precarious outcome than many recent theorists have tended to assume.Less
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. This book 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. The book 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. Fichte's ideas have resurfaced with nearly every crisis of globalization from the Napoleonic wars to the present, and his book remains a uniquely systematic and complete discussion of what John Maynard Keynes later termed “national self-sufficiency.” Fichte's provocative contribution to the social contract tradition reminds us, the book concludes, that the combination of a liberal theory of the state with an open economy and international system is a much more contingent and precarious outcome than many recent theorists have tended to assume.
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300162547
- eISBN:
- 9780300163742
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300162547.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, Environmental History
This chapter discusses a scheme that involved the planting of several million seedlings of larch, which was intended to secure the naval timber supply of the Perthshire Highlands, and of the whole of ...
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This chapter discusses a scheme that involved the planting of several million seedlings of larch, which was intended to secure the naval timber supply of the Perthshire Highlands, and of the whole of Scotland, into the distant future. The scheme, which proposed by the fourth duke John Murray, highlights the centrality of forestry to the politics of the natural order in the Scottish Enlightenment, and combined natural expertise and private capital with the priorities of national self-sufficiency in the spirit of civil cameralism. A rival Scottish strategy, however, impeded the duke's efforts; Henry Dundas, now Lord Melville, commissioned a global survey to identify accessible stands of naval timbers. A closer look at these strategies reveals that they both relied on naturalist expertise to solve a national crisis of resource exhaustion by setting up a timber reserve, and were merely variations on a common theme.Less
This chapter discusses a scheme that involved the planting of several million seedlings of larch, which was intended to secure the naval timber supply of the Perthshire Highlands, and of the whole of Scotland, into the distant future. The scheme, which proposed by the fourth duke John Murray, highlights the centrality of forestry to the politics of the natural order in the Scottish Enlightenment, and combined natural expertise and private capital with the priorities of national self-sufficiency in the spirit of civil cameralism. A rival Scottish strategy, however, impeded the duke's efforts; Henry Dundas, now Lord Melville, commissioned a global survey to identify accessible stands of naval timbers. A closer look at these strategies reveals that they both relied on naturalist expertise to solve a national crisis of resource exhaustion by setting up a timber reserve, and were merely variations on a common theme.
