14 - Receptions, Contestations and Confusions

Summary

Pufendorf’s reception and impact are not without paradox. Together with Grotius his name became a byword for natural law in his lifetime and has remained so. He was the key figure in the institutionalisation of natural law as an academic subject with wide-ranging extra-academic effect. Yet, his views were so widely and deeply contested from their publication that their original meaning and function mostly were lost sight of. Consequently, he has been subjected to a range of teleological interpretations that have persisted into contemporary scholarship, the most prominent being to see him as a proto-Enlightenment theorist of sociability and stadial history. His broad basis in erudite humanist scholarship was lost sight of, his ideas on constitutional law, ecclesiology and theology, and historiography being parcelled up along disciplinary lines. The effect was a narrowing of his legacy and with it the discipline of natural law in both moral philosophy and jurisprudence. This was despite his main commentator, Barbeyrac, himself being one of the last humanist scholars in natural law. The chapter discusses a range of the contestations about Pufendorf, including the remarkable contribution of Samuel Cocceji.