Right to Minimum Level of Subsistence

1 The idea that the poor must have some kind of support to maintain life and also to preserve public peace and order goes back centuries to Elizabethan England (Moyn 17), later emerging in Bavaria and Prussia, and during the French Revolution (Davis 1021). Furthermore, Blackstone in his Commentaries (1756) described the right to physical integrity and a basic minimum standard of living as an element of the right to security. However, what shapes the present debate on the minimum level of subsistence is the notion of ‘Existenzminimum’ of Germany and the Weimar...