Annabel Brett | Tanner Lectures

Professor of Political Thought and History
Cambridge University

The Times of Possibility

Lecture I: Subjects and Citizens: The Possibility Condition, Law and Democracy
Tuesday, April 22, 2025
4:10 p.m. – 6:15 p.m., Toll Room, Alumni House
with commentary by Melissa Lane

Lecture II: Time of Change: Possibility, Virtue and Democratic Politics of Time
Wednesday, April 23, 2025
4:10 p.m. – 6:15 p.m., Toll Room, Alumni House
with commentary by David Dyzenhaus

Seminar and Discussion with the Commentators
Thursday, April 24, 2025
4:10 p.m. – 6:15 p.m., Toll Room, Alumni House
with commentary by Melissa Lane and David Dyzenhaus

Register

Please register to attend this lecture series. This lecture series will not be live streamed, however, a recording will be made available on this page following the event.

About Annabel Brett

Annabel Brett is Professor of Political Thought and History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Trained in Classics, her first position was in the Department of Philosophy at the University of York before returning to Cambridge as a lecturer in the history of political thought in the Faculty of History. Her PhD research, published in 1997 as Liberty, right and nature. Individual rights in later scholastic thought, explored the intersection between constructions of nature and of right across a range of late medieval and early modern sources. That interface remains a central concern in her second monograph, Changes of state. Nature and the limits of the city in early modern natural law (2011), here focusing on the political community rather than human liberty as the key site of negotiation. She has published numerous other articles and papers, many of them devoted to late scholastic thought which she has made an object of particular study. She has a keen interest in translation, having produced translations of two medieval political tracts (including Marsilius of Padua, The Defender of the Peace), and more recently she has become interested in the history of international law, co-editing the interdisciplinary volume History, politics, law. Thinking through the international (2021) with Megan Donaldson and Martti Koskenniemi. She has lectured and presented her research all over the world, and in 2023 was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Faculty of Theology, University of Helsinki.

About the Lectures

‘Law must be formulated with regard to the possible, if its maker wishes to punish a few to some purpose rather than many to no purpose.’ Plutarch, Lives (Solon)

‘A law shall be honest, just, possible, according to nature, according to the custom of the country, appropriate to time and place, necessary, useful.’ Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, Book II

From antiquity through the middle ages to the renaissance and early modern period, the idea that law must be possible for its subjects was a central motif of European legal and political thought. To command the impossible was a key marker of the tyrant. The classic example was Pharoah in the Book of Exodus, ordering the Israelites to make bricks without providing them with the necessary straw. Pharoah was here commanding the physically impossible of the Israelites. But from Plutarch (and indeed Plato) onwards, thinkers were more interested in the psychologically impossible. This could be something so contrary to natural human impulses that people cannot bring themselves to do it without extreme distress. Again, it was held to be a classic feature of tyranny to compel people to perform the repugnant in this way, recognised as a distinctive form of cruelty. Indeed, commanding the physically impossible could folded into this conception through an appreciation of the desperation that such commands induce. Thinkers were also interested, however, in what is psychologically impossible or intolerable based on the customary or cultural habits of a specific population. To legislate against this kind of possibility was also held to be tyrannical. I will call this ‘legislating down’, that is, law needs to bend down to the level of its subjects to be possible for them.

However, early modern thought recognised certain situations in which law could command the impossible. The central case is imminent danger to the commonwealth in time of war or time of plague. Here, citizens can legitimately be required to face death even if their every instinct is to run away; in other words, law can command the virtue of courage. I will call this ‘legislating up’, that is, the law requires citizens to raise themselves above their normal level of possibility. But although everyone agreed on this, they had interestingly different ideas of why it was not tyrannical to do so. There was far less agreement on demands that override customary psychology, partly because early modern legal thought was committed to the idea that changing the law is in general a bad thing. Law is embedded in habits and any change of habits invites lawlessness. Nevertheless, the alteration of religious practices required by the Reformation provoked a heated discussion on how far, and how fast, ecclesiastical law could command people to leave their familiar comfort zone of ritual. A parallel discussion took place in the context of conversion and urbanisation in the Spanish New World. Through all the debates over possibility ran the question of who decides what is intolerable and what is not, with colonial government the acute example of asymmetric decision on the possibility of law.

These Tanner Lectures aim to put the early modern concept of possibility in dialogue with current
legal and political thinking. The first lecture will develop a contrast between the possibility condition
in early modern and in twentieth-century legal thought, asking what this means for our understanding
of the subject of law and our concept of democratic citizenship. The second will focus on the
imbrication of possibility and time. As the above examples show, early modern possibility thinking
was centrally concerned with time – short-term times of emergency and longer-term times of deep-
seated structural change. We face such times today, and they raise key questions for democracies in
their challenge to the habitual frame of the possible and the expectations that go with it. Early modern
answers typically appeal to virtue, and this second lecture will examine the nexus between virtue,
possibility and a democratic politics of time.

About the Commentators

Melissa Lane

Class of 1943 Professor of Politics
Princeton University

Melissa Lane is the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University, where she is also Associated Faculty in Classics and in Philosophy. In 2024-25 she is based in the UK on sabbatical: in the fall of 2024, at Oxford as the Isaiah Berlin Visiting Professor, and in the winter and spring of 2025, in London as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Classical Studies and the Keeling Centre for Ancient Philosophy, and as Honorary Visiting Professor in Philosophy at UCL. She also holds a non-teaching appointment as the fiftieth Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College in London. Her most recent monograph, titled Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political and published in 2023 by Princeton University Press, was awarded the 2024 Book Prize of the Journal of the History of Philosophy. She is the only person ever to have delivered at Oxford both the Isaiah Berlin Lectures (hosted by the Faculty of Philosophy) and the Carlyle Lectures (hosted by the Faculties of History and Politics & International Relations).

David Dyzenhaus

University Professor of Law and Philosophy and Albert Abel Chair
University of Toronto

David Dyzenhaus is a professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Toronto, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. In 2023 he was awarded the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s Gold Medal, awarded to ‘an individual whose sustained leadership, dedication and originality of thought have inspired both students and colleagues.’ In 2024-2025, he holds a Humboldt Research Award at the Free University, Berlin. His most recent book is The Long Arc of Legality: Hobbes, Kelsen, Hart (Cambridge, 2022).