Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought

by Annabel Brett, Quentin Skinner (Editor), James H. Tully (Editor)

With the notion of individual rights as important in moral and political theory now as it has ever been, there is renewed speculation over the origins and development of this concept. Liberty, Right and Nature is a work of unusual scope and power that takes a fresh look at this intellectual tradition, and deploys an enormous range of further sources in order to reassess our understanding of its development, beginning with the texts of the thirteenth century poverty controversy and ending with a discussion of Thomas Hobbes' theory of natural rights.

Genres: Philosophy, History

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 16, 1997

About the author

Annabel Brett studied Classics at Cambridge before turning to the history of political thought for her PhD on subjective rights in later medieval scholastic thought, subsequently published as Liberty, right and nature by Cambridge University Press in 1997. After a research fellowship at Gonville and Caius College followed by a lectureship in Philosophy at the University of York, she returned to Cambridge in 1996 to take up a lectureship in History of Political Thought.

Currently Professor of Political Thought and History and a co-director of the Cambridge Centre for Political Thought, she has lectured and published widely in the history of late medieval and early modern moral and political thought, with an emphasis on the natural law tradition, Aristotelianism and scholastic philosophy. Her Carlyle Lectures of 2008 were published by Princeton University Press in 2011 as Changes of state. Nature and the limits of the city in early moder natural law. She is the author of a major new translation of Marsilius of Padua's The Defender of the Peace (2005) and retains a strong interest in the theory and practice of translation in history. More recently, she has turned her attention to the history of international law, resulting in several publications and a major collaborative project now published as Annabel Brett, Megan Donaldson and Martti Koskenniemi eds., History, politics, law. Thinking through the international (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Reviews

[Noah Torres · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brett's analyses of early modern Scholastic political and legal thought are top-notch and should serve as the foundation for any scholar looking to investigate the matter.