Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law

by Annabel Brett

This is a book about the theory of the city or commonwealth, what would come to be called the state, in early modern natural law discourse. Annabel Brett takes a fresh approach by looking at this political entity from the perspective of its boundaries and those who crossed them. She begins with a classic debate from the Spanish sixteenth century over the political treatment of mendicants, showing how cosmopolitan ideals of porous boundaries could simultaneously justify the freedoms of itinerant beggars and the activities of European colonists in the Indies. She goes on to examine the boundaries of the state in multiple senses, including the fundamental barrier between human beings and animals and the limits of the state in the face of the natural lives of its subjects, as well as territorial frontiers. Drawing on a wide range of authors, Brett reveals how early modern political space was constructed from a complex dynamic of inclusion and exclusion. Throughout, she shows that early modern debates about political boundaries displayed unheralded creativity and virtuosity but were nevertheless vulnerable to innumerable paradoxes, contradictions, and loose ends.



Changes of State is a major work of intellectual history that resonates with modern debates about globalization and the transformation of the nation-state.

Genres: History

264 pages, Hardcover

First published March 14, 2011

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).