Fichte's "Hobbes"

Fichte under a historical-conceptual perspective

Abstract

This paper aims at questioning the relationship of Fichte to the doctrine of natural law by an analysis of some enigmatic evocations of Hobbes in Fichte’s work as well as in the secondary literature. Its starting point as well as its red thread will be a query on the affinity between Fichte and Hobbes about which Nicolovius, a Prussian officer, speaks about in a letter sent to Charlotte Jacobi in 1807. The first goal of this paper is then to define the framework of Fichte’s confrontation with the Political science of his time. The second one is to criticize how such confrontation has been dealt with in the secondary literature.