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

by Annabel S. Brett

• ISBN13: 9780521543408
• ISBN10: 0521543401
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-10-16
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

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.