16. Gerald Stourzh-Vorlesung zur Geschichte der Menschenrechte und der Demokratie

Annabel Brett (Cambridge): The Possibility of Liberty: Law, Rights and Security in 17th-Century Political Thought

Moderation: Thomas Angerer

Präsenzveranstaltung

Die Aufzeichnung des Vortrags und der Diskussion wird nach dem Vortrag auf https://gerald-stourzh-vorlesungen.univie.ac.at/ verfügbar sein.

Abstract:

This lecture explores the contours of freedom in British political thought from Hobbes to Locke from a new direction: the idea, widespread in the legal and political thought of the time, that obligations must be possible for the subject to fulfil. This ‘possibility condition’, which is effective on both laws and covenants, structures the interface between the rights and the duties of subjects. This lecture addresses what contemporaries meant by ‘possible’ in this context, revealing a rich conception of what contemporaries called ‘moral’ possibility lying behind the more celebrated pronouncements of political thinkers such as Hobbes. We shall see how moral possibility comes to be bound up with security as a condition of law, shedding fresh light on the interface between the state of freedom and the state of security which is one of the hallmarks of later seventeenth-century natural law thinking.

Zur Vortragenden:

Annabel Brett ist Professor of Political Thought and History sowie Co-Direktorin 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, insbesondere der Naturrechtstradition, dem Aristotelismus und der scholastischen Philosophie sowie auch der Geschichte des Völkerrechts.

Veröffentlichungen in Auswahl: Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought (1997); Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Mithg. 2006); Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law (2011); History, Politics, Law: Thinking through the International (Mithg. 2021).

Rückfragen: martina.fuchs@univie.ac.at