ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the different treatments within the tradition of social contract legal and political theory and broadly characterize their common structural approach. It describes the points where J. G. Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling agree and where they disagree. The chapter shows that the young writer tended to substantialize or solidify the transcendental agency that Fichte more delicately tried to indicate with phrases such as “self-reverting activity” and “self-consciousness.” Fichte and Schelling place themselves within the natural rights-natural law tradition of modern political theorists. Schelling and Fichte have different basic or deep-structural starting points, Fichte’s the account of self-reverting, self-affecting and self-conscious activity that Wissenschaftslehre furnishes, Schelling’s the power ontology borrowed from Spinoza and dressed out in Kantian language. Fichte seems sanguine about the sacrifice of freedom involved in the self-limitation of the rights stance; a highly stable and secure political order is at the pinnacle of his theory.
