In a pair of texts published in 1795, the philosopher, physician, and public intellectual Johann Benjamin Erhard offered a broadly Kantian defense of the right to revolution under conditions of structural injustice. Erhard’s theory of revolution is of continuing interest, for Erhard’s theory touches on difficult practical questions related to what we might call the ethics of revolutionary action. The primary aim of my paper is reconstructive; I aim to give a philosophical account of the overall shape of Erhard’s theory of justified revolutionary action. In the course of my reconstruction of Erhard’s account, I focus especially on the central role of epistemic limitations regarding the consequences of revolutionary action in Erhard’s account. Erhard is focused on the fact that revolution is an inherently risky endeavor, with potentially enormous downsides for society, and for those on whose behalf revolutionaries purport to act. Erhard takes the problem of revolution’s dangerous unpredictability very seriously as an obstacle to the justification of revolutionary action. This is both a merit of his account, and the source of some interpretative and philosophical puzzles, which occupy me in the second half of the paper.

In his Foundations of Natural Right, J. G. Fichte advances the innovative thesis that the theory of right is independent of, or separate from, moral theory. Although Fichte is concerned to stress the originality of his approach, he refers approvingly to some “excellent hints” in the writings of J. B. Erhard. Given the recent scholarly interest in Fichte’s account of the relationship between right and morality, it is surprising that Erhard’s position is seldom discussed. Where it is discussed, it is often presented as merely a hesitant precursor of Fichte’s position. This paper provides a corrective to that view by arguing that Erhard’s account of the relationship between right and morality constitutes a distinctive and philosophically compelling position. In the first two sections, I reconstruct Erhard’s account of the relationship between right and morality. I argue that Erhard’s position is best characterized as focusing on the dynamic interplay between the theory of right and the requirements of morality as articulated by Kantian moral theory. In the third section, I demonstrate the coherence and significance of Erhard’s position by considering it in relation to a central debate in the philosophy of law—the debate between legal positivism and natural law theory.