ABSTRACT
Elise Reimarus (1735-1805) is a scarcely known figure of German Enlightenment thought. A prolific and respected writer and intellectual in her own day, she bestowed on Enlightenment Europe and its inheritors a substantial body of original contributions in philosophy and political theory. My intention in this chapter is to reclaim Elise Reimarus as a political thinker of eighteenth-century Germany by exploring a central theme in her philosophical writings: the distinctively ambiguous relationship between the legal and moral realms, which oscillates between an emphasis on their conceptual difference and a discourse on their possible identity. Tracing close parallels between the political works of Elise Reimarus and Immanuel Kant, I will argue that they conceptualize the distinction between legal and moral justice in remarkably similar ways.
