Samuel Pufendorf Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694) was a German jurist and historian, often considered an important forerunner of the German Enlightenment and a significant influence upon British philosopher John Locke. In 1658, while he was the tutor for the family of a Swedish ambassador in Denmark, Pufendorf spent eight months in a Danish prison as a result of hostilities between the two countries. Later, he held professorships at the universities of Heidelberg and Lund and served as the royal Swedish historiographer and the Prussian court historian.

The violence of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) and the establishment of the Treaty of Westphalia marked Pufendorf ’s early years. As a result, his political and legal thinking was primarily concerned with the preservation and perpetuation of peaceful and stable states, and the duties of the good citizen in the new nation-state. Toward the end of his career, he moved away from politics, jurisprudence, and international law and devoted himself to studying history.

Despite his extraordinary influence in the seventeenth century, Pufendorf has been largely overlooked by later generations of political theorists and dismissed as a Grotian or a Hobbesian. In fact, his major work of natural law, De Jure Naturae et Gentium (1672), and the abridgement which followed it a year later, On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law (1673), seek to revise Dutch legal theorist Hugo Grotius’s natural law theory in light of English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s methodological and anthropological innovations to arrive at a new jurisprudence appropriate for the political and legal issues confronting the Westphalian world. Pufendorf argued that the law of nations is a part of natural law, not positive law, and that it applies universally to all of humanity, not only to Christian nations. His conception of natural law is essentially voluntarist and positivist; that is, he argued that there is no morality beyond the commands of God and all law proceeds from the will of a superior. In Pufendorf ’s view, human reason is sufficient only to generate principles of prudence and utility, not binding moral laws.

In contrast to Hobbes, Pufendorf believed that the state of nature was not a state of war, but he saw its peace as insecure. Accordingly, the first and supreme law of nature is the command that humanity be sociable; humans must adopt an attitude consistent with the preservation of social and political life. Pufendorf ’s voluntaristic understanding of natural law and natural rights results in an authoritarian conception of political power, in which the state is a moral person with the rights, powers, and will formerly belonging to individuals; in this, Pufendorf anticipates the social contract tradition.

Pufendorf ’s demarcation argument strengthened his justification of authoritarian political power. He argued that while all law comes ultimately from God, divine, natural, and civil laws are methodologically distinct and apply to different spheres of life. In essence, he sought to separate religion from the state in an effort to overcome the religious conflicts that characterized the Thirty Years War. The desacralization of politics meant that political rulers could no longer be held accountable to moral norms beyond their authority and that religion was relegated to the private sphere. The deconfessionalization of politics was, for Pufendorf, the first step toward an enduring peace in the wake of the Treaty of Westphalia.

Bibliography:

Carr, Craig, and Michael Seidler. “Pufendorf, Sociality and the Modern State.” History of Political Thought 17, no. 3 (1996): 354–378.
Hunter, Ian. Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Pufendorf, Samuel. De Jure Naturae et Gentium Libri Octo. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934.
On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Samuel Pufendorf on the Natural State of Men. Ceredigion, U.K.: Mellen Press, 1990.
Saastamoinen, Kari. The Morality of the Fallen Man: Samuel Pufendorf on Natural Law. Helsinki, Fin.: SHS, 1995.

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