Johann Benjamin Erhard on economic injustice

Elisabeth Theresia Widmer

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Unlike Johann Benjamin Erhard’s views on art, right, revolution, and structural misrecognition, his discussion of economic injustice, here understood as the lawful economic oppression of one’s end-setting human nature, has garnered little attention. To begin filling this gap, I focus on central passages from his 1795 book On the Right of the People to a Revolution wherein Erhard discusses two cases of economic injustice. By reconstructing these claims within his Kantian perfectionist framework, I pursue two goals. First, I seek to demonstrate that his fundamental ‘duty to oneself’ lays out a comprehensive framework for duties grounding moral obligations to remedy economic practices. My second aim is to utilize this framework to explain how he defends a natural law position that views the legal system as both a remedy for and an ideological tool of economic oppression. I argue that this twofold perspective is a strength of Erhard’s theory as it allows for the detection of oppressive economic structures without letting go of a principle of external freedom from where coercive juridical laws can be derived.

Keywords: perfectionism; perfect and imperfect duties; capitalism; Marxism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 17 pages
Date: 2025-02-20
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Published in British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 20, February, 2025. ISSN: 0960-8788

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