German Idealism and the Concept of Punishment

Jean-Christophe Merle is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy, University of Tours, an Honorary Professor at the University of Saarland and a lecturer at the University of Tübingen.

• Preface; List of abbreviations; Introduction; Part I. Desert as the Sole Justification for Punishment: 1. The two Kantian concepts of right; 2. Kant's legal justification of punishment; 3. Kant's moral justification of punishment; Part II. Punishment as a Means of Rehabilitation: 4. Fichte's 'expiation contract'; 5. Hegel's negation of crime; Part III. Retributivist Inhumanity: 6. Nietzsche and punishment without remorse; 7. Why are crimes against humanity punished at all?; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

'Merle's book is a first-rate, refreshingly new piece of scholarship on Kant and German idealism. Almost all scholarship on the philosophers in question either argue or just assume that Kant, Fichte, and Hegel are retributivists when it comes to punishment. Merle shows that the relevant texts in question are in fact very ambiguous, even somewhat confused in places, but that it is overwhelmingly clear that none of these three philosophers holds an unequivocally retributivist position. In reading this book, I not only found my own prior views on the topic challenged, I found I had learned a great deal by the time I had finished.' Terry Pinkard, Georgetown University