Foundations Of Natural Right – Fichte

In this case the external law of right exists, but [149] can be applied only within a commonwealth. Thus, natural right disappears. But what we lose on the one side, we recover on the other, and at a profit; lor the state itself becomes the human being’s natural condition, and its laws ought to be nothing other than natural right realized.)

§16 Deduction of the concept of a commonwealth The problem that we were left with, that we could not solve, and that we hope to solve through the concept of a commonwealth, was this: how to bring about a power that can enforce right (or what all persons necessarily will) amongst persons who live together. (I) The object of their common will is mutual security; but since, as we have assumed, persons are motivated only by self-love and not morality, each individual wills the security of the other only because he wills his own, willing the other’s security is subordinate to willing one’s own; no one is concerned whether the other is secure against oneself, except to the extent that the other’s security is the condition of one’s own security against the other.

We can express this briefly in the following formula: Each person subordinates the common end to his private end. (This is what the law of coercion reckons with; [151] by linking the welfare of each in reality to the security of the welfare of all others, the law of coercion is meant to produce this reciprocity, this necessary conjunction of the two ends, in the will of each individual.)

The will of a power that exercises the right of coercion cannot be constituted in this way; for, since the private will is subordinated to the common will only through coercive power, and since this coercive power is supposed to be superior to all other power, the private will of the coercive power could be subordinated to the common will only by its own power, which is absurd. Therefore, the coercive power’s private Foundations of natural right will must already be subordinated to and in harmony with the common will, and there must be no need to bring about such subordination and harmony, i.e.

the private will of the coercive power and the common will must be one and the same; the common will itself, and nothing else, must be the private will of the coercive power, and this power must have no other particular and private will at all.

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J. G. FICHTE Foundations of Natural Right According to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre EDITED BY FREDERICK NEUHOUSER Cornell University TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL BAUR Fordham University ■ftomas J. Bata Library TRENT uNi vcRSiH PETERBOROUGH. ONTARIO CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK www.cup.cam.ac.uk 40 West 20th Street, New York, ny 10011-4211, USA www.cup.org 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia Ruiz de Alarcon 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain © Cambridge University Press 2000 The book is in copyright.

Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2000 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge Typeset in Ehrhardt 11/i3pt System 3b2 [ce] A catalogue record for this hook is available from the British Library Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 1762-1814. [Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Principien der Wissenschaftslehre. English] Foundations of natural right / J.

G. Fichte; edited by Frederick Neuhouser; translated by Michael Baur. p. cm. – (Cambridge texts in the history of philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o 521 57591 5 (hardback) – ISBN o 521 57301 7 (paperback) 1. Natural law. 2. Political science. 3. State, The. 1. Neuhouser, Frederick. 11. Title, m. Series.

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