If there is one thing modern societies have learned from pandemic years and chronic inequality, it is that health is not a private matter. The spread of illness—biological, social, and moral—exposes how deeply our lives are intertwined. Yet we still talk about healthcare as if it were an optional service, a product to be purchased, rationed, or withheld, rather than what it truly is: the precondition of freedom itself. To see why this matters, we might turn not to a medical economist or a contemporary political theorist, but to a philosopher who wrote at the turn of the nineteenth century—Johann Gottlieb Fichte, one of the founders of German Idealism and a thinker of startling moral precision.

Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right (1796–97) is not, at first glance, a work about health. It is a rigorous attempt to deduce the very concept of rights from the nature of self-consciousness. Yet buried in its dense pages is a simple, radical truth: human freedom is not a solitary state but a social relationship. We are only free, Fichte argues, because we recognize others as free, and because they recognize us in turn. This mutual recognition—what he calls Anerkennung—is not an optional courtesy or a moral luxury; it is the condition of being a self at all.

For Fichte, the famous “I think” of philosophy does not stand alone. It can exist only in dialogue. “No rational being can posit itself as an individual,” he writes, “without positing others as individuals outside it.” In other words, freedom begins not with independence but with interdependence. Our autonomy, our sense of self-determination, presupposes that others exist who acknowledge us as free beings.

That insight has immense political implications. If every person’s freedom depends on the freedom of others, then society’s first duty is to create and maintain the external conditions that make freedom possible for all. Fichte calls this realm of external freedom right (Recht), and he insists that the state exists for no other reason than to secure it. The government is not a machine for enforcing laws or collecting taxes—it is, as he beautifully puts it, “the visible body of freedom.”

Once you take that premise seriously, healthcare ceases to be a question of policy design or partisan preference. It becomes a matter of justice. Health is not a consumer good or a lifestyle choice; it is one of the essential conditions that allow human beings to act freely in the world. Without a functioning........

© Blitz