9 - The Civil Order: Law, Punishment and Social Value

Summary

The chapter analyses Pufendorf’s comprehensive account of the civil condition that arises through the institution of new civil personae that replace those of the natural condition and are governed by sui generis principles and values. The basic principles for civic life are laid down through discussions of civil law (denying Hobbes’s identification of it with natural law), punishment, social value (“esteem”), and public power over property, all of which are treated in terms of the transition from the natural to the civil condition and founded in civic purposes, not in nature. This transition is not considered as a transfer of natural morality into the civil sphere, but rather in terms of the requirements of a civil order grounded in civil sovereignty and the civil state as an imposed status or condition. The same argument applies to “the right of war which accompanies a natural state <but> is taken away from individuals in a state”. Once the right of war is considered a matter for the sovereign alone, it must be part of Pufendorf’s account of civil society, an arrangement that underlines his insistence that there is no law of nations distinct from natural law, as discussed in ch. 10.