David James is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Rousseau and German Idealism: Freedom, Dependence and Necessity (Cambridge, 2013) and Fichte's Social and Political Philosophy: Property and Virtue (Cambridge, 2011).

Introduction; 1. Selfhood, virtue and the Wissenschaftslehre; 1.1 Fichte's critique of Rousseau; 1.2 The dispute between idealism and dogmatism; 1.3 Idealism and virtue; 1.4 The republic of scholars; 2. Practical reason, conscience and ethical vocation; 2.1 The primacy of practical reason; 2.2 Conscience and radical evil; 2.3 Ethical vocation; 3. The relation between moral subjectivity and history in Fichte's defence of the French Revolution; 3.1 Moral subjectivity and history; 3.2 Experience and history; 4. Fichte's philosophy of history: the future ages of humanity as postulates of pure practical reason; 4.1 Practical need and the end of reason; 4.2 Fichte's world plan; 4.3 Fichte's instrumentalization of history; 5. The absolute state: coercion and perfectibility; 5.1 The absolute state; 5.2 From Rechtsstaat to Kulturstaat; 6. Fichte's Republic; 6.1 The idea of a new German university; 6.2 The role of the new university in a German national education; 6.3 Philosophy and the life of the nation; 6.4 Love of fatherland and the moral will; 6.5 The German Republic; 7. The role of language in Fichte's construction of the nation; 7.1 Creating the nation; 7.2 Fichte's idea of an original language; 7.3 The Germans as speakers of an original language; 7.4 Language and the construction of the nation; 7.5 Fichte and Machiavelli; Bibliography; Index.