Here we seem to be back with Plato and Aristotle. We are in fact too near to Plato; for the distinction between maintenance of the citizen’s determinate activity, and maintenance of the general conditions of such activity, being destroyed by Fichte in his desire to make State action positive and not negative, the conclusion necessarily arises that the citizen must be secured and maintained in his definite activity or occupation, and from this springs the notion of the closed commercial State; “closed” against foreign trade in order that the government may be able to determine prices and assign occupations. In other words, the basis of the State is still the Ego conceived as the individual self; it is not the social good operating by its own { 247} power on intelligent will. And, arising from this individualism, the precautions which seem necessary to protect and sustain the individual in his fixed relation to the whole, make Fichte’s “Closed Commercial State” perhaps the earliest document of a rigorous State Socialism. Freedom, as he himself recognises to be _prima facie_ the case, is annihilated by the provisions for its protection. [1] It is curious to see Rousseau’s phrase “forced to be free,” [2] which refers in him to the supremacy of law, reappearing as a defence of the enforcement of leisure time, [3] as though freedom were not realised in labour and in loyalty. Here is Hegel’s judgment of the transition we have just been considering.
“Kant began to found right on freedom, and Fichte too in his _Natural Right_ made freedom his principle; but it is, as in Rousseau, the freedom of the particular individual. This is a great beginning; but in order to get to particular results they were obliged to accept presuppositions. The universal (for them) is not the spirit, the substance of the whole, but the external mechanical negative power against individuals. ... The individuals remain always hard and negative against one another; the prison-house, the bonds, become ever more oppressive, instead of the State being apprehended as the realisation of freedom.” [4]
[1] Fichte, _Nachgelassene Werke_, ii. 535.
[3] Of course such enforcement may have justification.
[4] Hegel, _Geschichte der Philosophie_, iii. 576. The idea of organism was thus mechanically apprehended.