“All those three powers in the State (Sovereignty or the Legislative, the Executive, and the Judicial), are offices; and, as essential, and necessarily proceeding from the idea of a State in general with reference to the establishment (Constitution) of one, are offices _of State_. They contain the relation of a universal supreme Power (which, considered according to laws of freedom, can be no other than the united people), to the crowd of individuals which compose it _qua_ the governed; that is, of the ruler (_imperans_) to the {244} subject (_subditus_). The act whereby the people constitutes itself into a State, _or strictly speaking only the idea of that Act, according to which idea alone the justice of the Act can be conceived_, [1] is _the original contract_, [2] according to which all (_omnes et singuli_) of the people surrender their external freedom, in order at once to receive it back again as members of a commonwealth, that is, of the people regarded as a State (_universi_). And one cannot say, The State, or man in the State, has sacrificed a part of its innate outward freedom for a certain end; but rather, he has totally abandoned his wild lawless freedom in order to find his entire freedom again undiminished in a lawful dependence, that is, in a condition of right or law; (undiminished), because this dependence springs from his own legislative will.” [3] [1] The italics are mine. [2] Kant’s italics. [3] _Ib_., 160 It is remarkable, in face of these general views, that both Kant and Fichte follow Rousseau, for reasons which Kant explains from the political conditions of the time, in distrusting representative government. [1] [1] _Ib_., 166 (the deputies are practically dependent on the Ministry). But cf. p. 193, which shows that in a true Republic the representative system might, according to Kant, be a reality, and then would be the ideal form. The whole discussion is full of reference to Rousseau. The passage just cited is of course a reproduction of Rousseau’s view modified by interpretation very much in the sense in which we interpreted it above. 3. When we pass to Fichte (whose earlier work upon _Natural Right_ was published actually before that of Kant), we observe the idea of contract in the act of transmuting itself, though {245} by an imperfect transition, into the idea of an organic whole. For Fichte, the State is a necessary implication of the human self; for a self involves a society of selves, and law or right is the relation between selves in a bodily world. And the “contract” on which citizenship rests, by the fact that it is general, [1] forges an indiscernible unity of the social whole. In this connection, Fichte makes the remarkable claim to be first to apply the simile of an organism to the whole civic relation. I cite an important passage: