4 - Pufendorf's civil philosophy

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Born in 1632 and coming to intellectual maturity in the immediate aftermath of the Thirty Years War, Samuel Pufendorf found himself confronted with the task of developing an ethics and politics suited to life in the descralised states sanctioned by the Treaty of Westphalia. As a political-jurisprudential councillor at the courts of Sweden (1677–87) and Brandenburg-Prussia (1688–94), he had first-hand experience of the problems such states confronted in attempting to establish deconfessionalised civil orders in the wake of protracted confessional conflict. In this context, Pufendorf encountered university metaphysics – with its claim to ground political right in philosophically known transcendent reasons and laws – as a major intellectual obstacle and institutional enemy. In order to render moral and political philosophy capable of comprehending the gap that had been opened between civil and religious authority, Pufendorf had to ‘detranscendentalise’ it in a manner that would parallel the desacralising of law and politics. This task – whose central texts are the De Jure Naturae et Gentium Libri Octo (On the Law of Nature and Nations in Eight Books) of 1672, its epitome of the following year, the De Officio Hominis et Civis juxta Legem Naturalem Libri Duo (On the Duty of Man and Citizen according to Natural Law in Two Books), and the De Habitu Religionis Christianae ad Vitam Civilem (Of the Disposition of Religion in Relation to Civil Life) of 1687 – entailed a fundamental and far-reaching reconfiguration of philosophical, political, and moral culture.