16. Gerald Stourzh-Vorlesung zur Geschichte der Menschenrechte und der Demokratie
Annabel Brett
The Possibility of Freedom:
Between Natural Rights and Human Rights in Seventeenth-Century Political Thought
14. Mai 2025
© A. Brett
Annabel Brett ist Professor of Political Thought and History sowie Kodirektorin des Cambridge Centre for Political Thought an der University of Cambridge. In ihrer Forschung beschäftigt sie sich mit dem politischen Denken des Spätmittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit, sowie der Geschichte des Völkerrechts.
Auswahl aus den Veröffentlichungen: 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, hg. mit James Tully und 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, hg. mit Megan Donaldson und Martti Koskenniemi (Cambridge University Press 2021).
Homepage von 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.