Heinrich Rickert, Emil Lask and Gustav Radbruch

The Philosophical Genesis of the Argument of Extreme Injustice in the Tradition of the Philosophy of Values

Abstract

This article investigates the axiological-juridical foundations underpinning Gustav Radbruch's philosophy of law, with special attention to his renowned formula of extreme injustice, proceeding from the hypothesis that this formulation does not represent a rupture in the author's work, but rather the organic maturation of a thought carefully constructed upon the structures of the Philosophy of Values of the Baden School, particularly in the figure of Heinrich Rickert, and upon Emil Lask's theory of objects, the latter being profoundly strained by the phenomenological critique of Edmund Husserl. The argumentative path begins with a detailed analysis of Rickert's method of cultural sciences, advances through Lask's critical mediation, which inscribes law as a cultural object referred to values, and culminates in the Radbruchian synthesis itself, which defines law as a reality whose meaning lies in serving the idea of justice. The ineliminable conflict among the antinomies of the idea of law — justice, purpose, and legal certainty — is then examined, to finally demonstrate how the formula of extreme injustice emerges as a necessary result of a philosophy that situates law in the intermediate space between being and ought-to-be, fact and value, finding in human rights the insurmountable material limit of positivity.