Le système du droit, Philosophie et droit dans la pensée de Fichte (review)

498 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 26:3 JULY 1988 Alain Renaut, Le systbme du droit, Philosophie et droit dam la pens~e de Fichte. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986, 463 pp. 285 FF. One of the more remarkable facts about twentieth-century Fichte studies is the leading role played by French authors. Though German scholars have always dominated this field and have produced many detailed studies of particular texts and themes, they have generally avoided attempts to provide an overall interpretation of Fichte's philosophical achievement and have produced nothing to rival such works as Xavier L6on's Fichte et son temps (1922-~7) , Martial Gueroult's L'kvolution et la structure de la doctrine de la science chez Fichte (x93o), and Alexis Philonenko's La libert~ humaine dar~ la philosophie de Fichte (1966). To this distinguished list one must now add Main Renaut's Le syst~me du droit, which is, quite simply, one of the most remarkable books ever written about Fichte. In fact, it is really three works in one: In the first place, it is a detailed study of Fichte's Grundlage des Naturrechts 0796-97); secondly, it offers a profoundly original reinterpretation of the overall structure of Fichte's entire system (in its original version of 1794-1799); and finally, it is a spirited brief in behalf of the contemporary relevance of Fichte's social and political thought. The most distinctive feature of Fichte's Rechtslehre is his insistence upon the autonomy of this discipline, more specifically, his refusal to allow questions of "right" or '~justice" to be reduced either to questions of morality or to questions of fact; that is to say, his disinclination to subordinate Rechtslehre to Sittenlehre (and hence his rejection of romantic utopianism) coupled with his unwavering affirmation of the essential role of human freedom in political life (and hence his rejection of positivism and historicism). The result is a rigorously formal analysis of the concept of "right," an analysis which begins with a transcendental deduction of intersubjectivity--that is, a demonstration that recognition of and by other human beings is a condition for the possibility of selfconsciousness . The sphere of "rights" is thereby defined as comprising those limitations upon individual freedom which are an essential condition for the possibility of free human community--and thus of consciousness itself. But this formal "deduction" of the pure concept of right is only the first step. After the concept has been deduced, Fichte has to show that it can be experienced, which is to say, "represented." In other words, he has to provide a "schematism" for the application of the pure concept of right. In what is certainly the most original portion of his commentary on the Grundlage des Naturrechts, Renaut shows how Fichte appropriates Rousseau's notion of the "social contract" and reinterprets it (in good Kantian fashion) as the "schematization" of the pure concept of right. Nor is the mere schematized concept of right sufficient for Fichte's purpose. The final step is to show how this schematized concept can actually be applied within the concrete world, i.e., how the "social contract" can be instantiated in an actual state. With this, the transition is complete: from Rechtslehre to Staatslehre, from metaphysics to political philosophy, and from philosophy to politics. A noteworthy feature of this transition is Fichte's refusal to ascribe to it any sort of theoretical "necessity." Rather than seeking refuge in a theory of inevitable progress ("the cunning of reason"), Fichte espouses an essentially practical philosophy of history, viewed as the product of free human choice. BOOK REVIEWS 499 As for the details of Fichte's political theory, Renaut provides an illuminating account of Fichte's "republican" ideal and shows how it represents an attempted synthesis of democratic (individualistic) and authoritarian (collectivist) elements, or, as Renaut puts it, "a synthesis of Locke and Hobbes." To his credit, Renaut does not minimize the difficulties inherent in Fichte's political philosophy and explicitly addresses such notorious problems as the role of the "ephorate" in Fichte's theory of the state as well as the allegedly proto-totalitarian aspects of Fichte's "police state." Though Renaut's analysis...