The Case against the Marriage of Natural Law and Natural Rights, by Tracey Rowland:

p. 83 Louis Dupré, in his intellectual histories, also highlights the contextual issue of this question. Dupré draws attention to the fact that Francisco Suárez (1548–1617) gave natural law a content independent of any political structure and thereby ‘created a rift between a natural law based on abstract reason and the political condition in which it had to find its concrete expression’.55 He argues that this ‘typically modern separation between an abstract idea of human nature and a concrete political realization of it opened a space for an area of “human rights” that existed before and independent of any social structure’.56 It was then relatively easy for Thomas Hobbes to build the priority of the individual with respect to social structures into a consistent political theory. In contrast, Dupré observes that in the classical tradition, ‘rights had acquired a normative status only in and through the legal community’, since ‘once the human self becomes detached from its cosmic and transcendent moorings, .57