16th Gerald Stourzh Lecture on the History of Human Rights and Democracy
Annabel Brett
The Possibility of Freedom: Between Natural Rights and Human Rights in Seventeenth-Century Political Thought
14 May 2025
© A. Brett
Annabel Brett is Professor of Political Thought and History and co-director of the Cambridge Centre for Political Thought at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests include the history of political thought, primarily early modern but also ancient and late medieval, and the history of international law.
Selected publications: Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought (Cambridge University Press 1997); Marsilius of Padua: The Defender of the Peace (Cambridge University Press 2005); Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ed. with James Tully and Holly Hamilton-Bleakley (Cambridge University Press 2006); Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law (Princeton University Press 2011); History, Politics, Law: Thinking through the International, ed. with Megan Donaldson and Martti Koskenniemi (Cambridge University Press 2021).
Homepage of Annabel Brett
Abstract
The relationship between natural rights and human rights is a much-discussed question in the literature on the history of human rights. In this lecture, I suggest an interface between the two in the idea of possibility as a condition of law in seventeenth century political thought. Thinkers were particularly interested in psychological impossibility as a limit of human positive legislation, and the cluster of vocabulary surrounding this condition yields a distinctive conception of the inhuman which is both illuminating historically and suggestive for our thinking today.