Bangladesh, Oct. 27 -- 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.

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