Richard Price and his contemporaneous Left-Kantianism

Williams, Huw L. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7577-8816 2026. Richard Price and his contemporaneous Left-Kantianism. Kantian Review 10.1017/s1369415425101179

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Abstract

Those who have engaged with the moral and political thought of Richard Price have often commented on the striking similarities with Kant. Price, as much a polymath as he was a philosopher, was nevertheless a very different intellectual figure, widely admired at the time in Europe and America as a radical, but sporadic rather than systematic in his writing. This paper will consider his thinking holistically, in particular drawing on recent research on his economic commentaries and work on insurance. This expositional work around Price’s nascent political economy lays the basis for defending his positioning as a proto-socialist thinker – whose commitments also fit with the key tenets of 18th-century Left-Kantianism. It is argued that these claims, and his extant anti-capitalist thought, make Price an important and intriguing foil against which to consider Kant’s own leftist credentials, and for expanding the debate around the latter’s political economy and Left-Kantianism more generally.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > English, Communication and Philosophy
Additional Information:	License information from Publisher: LICENSE 1: URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, Type: open-access
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
ISSN:	1369-4154
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	17 March 2026
Date of Acceptance:	27 November 2025
Last Modified:	17 Mar 2026 12:01
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/185810

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