The Closed Commercial State

First Chapter: Preamble

First Chapter Preamble To wonder at nothing is the peak of wisdom, says one of the ancients.8 So long as he is talking about the astonishment at the unexpected that robs us of our composure and disturbs our calm reflection, he is entirely right. Yet we wish to add that in the ability to wonder about something consists the predisposition to wisdom, thinking for oneself, and freely producing concepts. Someone who is not a thinker, but who nevertheless has healthy senses and memory, grasps the actual state of things that lies before his eyes and makes a mental note of it. He need do nothing more than this, since, after all, he only has to live and conduct his business in the actual world, and doesn’t feel the least bit drawn toward thoughts that, as it were, not being needed right on the spot, are stockpiled for the future. He never either transcends this actual state of affairs with his thought or thinks of another, but rather, through the habit of only thinking this state of affairs, there arises in him gradually, and without him properly becoming conscious of it, the presupposition that only this state of affairs is and only this could be. The concepts and customs of his people and his age seem to him to be the only possible concepts and customs of all peoples and all ages. He certainly does not wonder at the fact that everything now is just as it is, for according to him it simply cannot be otherwise. He certainly will never raise the question of how it has come to be this way, since according to him it was this way from the beginning. If he is confronted with a description of other peoples {449} or ages, or a philosophical sketch of how it has never been but everywhere should have been, he will always drag in the pictures of his world, from which he cannot tear himself away, seeing everything [92] in terms of this world and never grasping the entire sense of what is presented before him. It is his incurable illness to regard the accidental as necessary. He, on the other hand, who has become accustomed to using thought not only to copy what actually exists, but to freely create within himself what is possible, very often finds that entirely different nexuses and relations of things are just as possible—indeed far more possible, natural, and rational—than those that are given. He not only finds the given relations 137 138 Second Book to be accidental, but at times wondrously strange [wunderlich]. And so he raises the question: How and in which way did everything come to be the way that it is, since it surely could have been otherwise in countless different ways? The history of the past answers this question for him, since indeed all historical research of deep penetration neither can nor should be anything else than a genetic answer to the causal question: How has the present state of things arisen, and what are the reasons that the world formed itself into what we find before us? Here our only concern is with commerce. My readers have already seen that, with regard to commerce, the author holds that a state of affairs entirely different from what we find in the actual world is not only possible , but indeed demanded by the law of Right. Thus, he may at any rate wonder why it is not the latter state of affairs, but that which we actually see before us, that came into being. At present we need only describe the state of affairs that actually came into being. Such a portrayal is part of the history of the present time, and yet perhaps we can make this description even clearer by casting a glance at how the given state of affairs emerged from that state of affairs immediately preceding it. Here too we will count on the reader having the ability and the willingness to wonder at things and the adroitness to look away from the present {450} and enter with his thought wholly into the past or the future. ...