It has become commonplace to take J. G. Fichte as one of the prophets of nationalism. Indeed, the dominant tendency in nationalism studies is to view Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation, delivered in 1807–8, as one of the founding documents of German nationalism. It is, moreover, taken as the primary example of a work declaring an ethnic nationalist viewpoint, something that not only defines the German nation in terms of an Urvolk, but which advances a notion of the nation defined in terms of a genealogical myth of common or shared descent. This view has become enshrined in nationalism studies, especially since Elie Kedourie and George Armstrong Kelly wrote on Fichte in the 1960s. This is despite the work of Hans Kohn, in the same decade, who at least acknowledged that if the German nation was sometimes treated as a concrete entity by Fichte, and sometimes as an ideal entity, his guiding principle was nevertheless ‘not a historical and even less a biological reality, but a metaphysical idea’ (Kohn 1967: 241).

However, if Kohn underscores Fichte's guiding principle as a metaphysical idea, he also claims that Fichte simply made a mistake when he confused the ideal and the real, and that he made this blunder because his philosophical reasoning was overcome with national fervour. As he puts it, ‘under the stress of the times and of his own emotions, the rational philosopher, the disciple of Kant, rejected the power of reasoned argument. The intensity of individual emotions seemed to him a sufficient foundation for truth’ (ibid. 238). He thus dismisses Fichte's Addresses as merely confused; lacking a rigorous philosophical system, it does not stand for Kohn beside Fichte's earlier philosophical works. The danger of Fichte's work for Kohn is thus not ultimately its metaphysics, but its lack of a rigorous and systematic metaphysics. There has since been little work done on Fichte's Reden an die deutsche Nation in the Anglophone world, and the little that has been written tends to endorse Kedourie's belief that the text declares an ethnic nationalist viewpoint.