Uploaded May 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
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.
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.
