The metaphysical foundation of the Self and the Right to revolution

In my paper, my aim is that of showing how Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Johann Benjamin Erhard analyse the principles of the French revolutionaries starting from some considerations about Immanuel Kant’s point of view. I argue that both Fichte and Erhard, in contrast to Kant, defend the people’s right to revolution by deriving it from freedom of thought and speech, which they ground, in turn, on a metaphysical foundation of the concepts of freedom and the self. In order to illustrate my thesis, I focus on Fichte’s writings on the Freedom of Thought and on the French Revolution, both appeared in 1793, as well as on Erhard’s pamphlet On the Right of the People to a Revolution from 1795.