Liberty, Right and Nature

Liberty, Right and Nature is a vibrant and powerful contribution to the recently renewed debate over natural rights and natural rights language. Annabel Brett argues persuasively that in order to understand the development of the concept we need to look at the way in which the Latin language of ius functioned in a wide range of philosophical contexts. Dr Brett traces the range of the terminology of rights within the scholastic tradition from the thirteenth-century poverty controversy to the works of the sixteenth-century neo-Thomistic ‘School of Salamanca’. A final chapter considers the consequences of this investigation for the rights theory of Thomas Hobbes. Dr Brett’s analysis covers a panoply of theological and legal sources, and should prove indispensable to all those working in the field of medieval and early modern moral and political philosophy.

• A major contribution to the history of ideas by an exceptionally gifted young scholar • The single most significant contribution to the field since Tuck’s Natural Rights Theories • Uses a wide range of new primary sources over a broad time-scale, i.e. thirteenth to seventeenth century

Acknowledgements; Notes on the Text; Introduction; 1. Right and liberty: the equivalence of dominium and ius; 2. Our just nature: subjective right in the fourteenth century; 3. Objective right and the Thomist tradition; 4. Liberty and nature: subjective right and Thomism in the Spanish sixteenth century; 5. The language of natural liberty: Fernando Vazquez de Menchaca; 6. Natural liberty in the next century: the case of Thomas Hobbes; Bibliography.