THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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Old guild rights are thus functionally renewed, as the guaranteed ability of the individual ‘exclusively to pursue a greater art’. In the case of land there is absolutely no
ownership, it belongs to nobody and to the farmer only in so far as he cultivates it (and is consequently not an idle feudal lord). After Fichte has thus brought possession
and ownership out of the law of property into a kind of law of production, he progresses to logical socialist conclusions. Precisely because of the original right to
property, it must be given to everyone by the state: ‘If someone does not have enough to be able to live, then he does not have what he is entitled to have; he does not
have what is his. In the rational state he will receive it; in the division which was made by chance and force before the awakening and the rule of reason everyone
certainly did not receive it, because others took more for themselves than was due to them’ (l.c., p. 433). And further on in this state­socialist text: ‘The task of the
state has been only one­sidedly and half understood up to now, as an institution for keeping the citizen at the same proprietary level at which we find him, by means of
the law. The more deep­seated duty of the state first to establish everyone in the possession of what is due to him has been overlooked. But the latter is only possible if
the anarchy of commerce is abolished in just the same way as political anarchy is gradually being abolished, and the state closes into a commercial state just as it is
closed in its legislation and its judicial offices’ (l.c., p. 483). Fichte thereby extends, in his postulated ideal state, the generality of the law which had abolished the rights
of class and privilege to a generality of job creation. In addition, as a means towards this, there is the elimination of free enterprise, the shut­down of free competition.
In addition there is the abolition of the open market, in short: the destiny of the ideal state to be a controlled economy. This in a Germany which still hardly exhibited one
exponent of free enterprise and which therefore invited more easily than the advanced western states a kind of pre­capitalist anti­capitalism; as has already become
apparent in Fichte's work­guilds. The Romantic transfigurations of medieval society which Novalis had expressed shortly before this (‘Christendom or Europe’, 1799)
also probably had an influence here. A single common interest, said Novalis, connected the remotest provinces of this broad spiritual realm. Fichte, so little of a
Romantic in other respects, was in any case one of the first to touch on the backward­looking anti­capitalist utopia which is not entirely lacking in Saint­Simon and
which still emerged in Ruskin or William Morris as a kind of Gothic socialism. It would be erroneous, as Mehring says, in the case of the closed commercial state to
think of a mere idealization