Fichte takes the promotion of freedom rather than happiness as the legitimate end of political action. He revises the concept of spontaneity, especially in his System der Sittlenlehre, equating it with labour as the transformation of the sense-world under the command of an idea. The political system proposed in his Geschlossener Handelsstaat is a further application of this idea, together with attention to the conditions (epistemic, material, and intersubjective) necessary for the effective transposition of subjective intentions into objective results. Fichte’s political interventionism is fundamentally distinct from Wolff’s because of its commitment to the primacy of freedom, even when his own concrete prescriptions appear to undermine this objective. The political programmes of Fichte and Humboldt are alternative Kantianisms, but both exemplify post-Kantian perfectionist commitments to enhance the capacity for free activity.