Samuel Pufendorf’s stature as a European political, juridical and theological writer is comparable with that of his contemporaries Thomas Hobbes, Hugo Grotius and John Locke. Despite this, Pufendorf’s work is less well known than theirs, especially in English-speaking contexts, but even in his German homeland. One reason for this is that Pufendorf wrote in Latin and his works were only sporadically translated into European vernaculars. As far as English is concerned, there were significant translations of his natural law works in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and again in the 1930s, followed by some scholarly translations in the 1990s which were in turn followed by new scholarly studies. The first modern scholarly edition of Pufendorf’s texts did not begin until 1996 in Germany and is ongoing.Footnote 1
A second reason for Pufendorf’s relative obscurity is that there is no authoritative biography dedicated to him, leaving scholars to piece together his life and works from a variety of sources. In this, however, they have been immeasurably helped by the biographical and intellectual-historical studies of the German Pufendorf scholar Detlef Döring.Footnote 2 From Döring’s studies, and the bibliographic and critical studies of the Italian scholar Fiammetta Palladini,Footnote 3 emerges a vivid picture of the life, education, and political and intellectual itinerary of a particular kind of early modern political intellectual. Like all modern Pufendorf scholars, the editors of this volume are indebted to the work of these path-breaking Pufendorf researchers.
A final reason for Pufendorf’s somewhat blurred modern image is that it is difficult for today’s readers to recognize the kind of intellectual that he was. For the intellectual that we meet in Pufendorf’s works is a now-unfamiliar figure: the Protestant political humanist.
1. Political Humanism
To characterize Pufendorf as a political humanist is to name an intellectual persona that combined two dimensions that are at once unfamiliar to us and in a seemingly paradoxical relation to each other. In the first instance, political humanism refers to a style of thought and writing that, unlike modern political theory, was not grounded in philosophical principles but rather in the collection, investigation and use of classical texts.Footnote 4 Emerging in the Renaissance and reaching a peak during the seventeenth century, humanism was a Latinate scholarship based in philological studies of classic Greek, Latin and Christian texts.Footnote 5 These were treated as treasure troves of eloquence and repositories of wisdom, to be scrutinized and culled for exemplary concepts, histories, ways of life, kinds of person and forms of political rule. The Northern European humanism in which Pufendorf was formed was thus a fundamentally pedagogical phenomenon, inseparable from the teaching of Latin and the transmission of classic texts in the grammar schools and arts faculties that had adopted a reformed humanist pedagogy during the sixteenth century.Footnote 6 The notion that knowledge could be gained and problems solved through individual philosophical introspection was foreign to humanists like Machiavelli, Bruni, Erasmus, Lipsius, Casaubon, Scaliger, Grotius and thence Pufendorf. For them knowledge was gained by reading books. Pufendorf thus fashioned his arguments through continuous reference to and citation of a wide array of ancient texts, including those of Herodotus, Xenophon, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Livy, Cicero, Juvenal, Seneca, Tacitus, Horace, Ovid, Virgil, Epictetus, Diodorus Siculus, Quintilian, Lucian, Plutarch, Philo Judaeus, the Roman law Digest and the Bible, to name some of his more important sources. But he also used modern texts in the same way, drawing on works by Bacon, Casaubon, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Charron, Gentili, Descartes, Bodin, Selden, Spinoza and especially Hobbes and Grotius as sources of wisdom and as objects of criticism, repeated scrutiny of which allowed him to build his discourses, sharpen his insights and, in the case of Richard Cumberland, revise his major natural law treatise. The originality of the humanists lay not in exemplary acts of philosophical introspection – whether in the form of Descartes’ cogito, Leibniz’s ascent to clear and distinct ideas, or, later, Kant’s acts of transcendental deliberation – but rather in the painstaking scholarship in which they consulted, analysed and sometimes eclipsed the most formidable authorities in a given field. Pufendorf’s treatment of such authorities as Spinoza, Grotius and Hobbes was highly original in just this way.
Secondly, and somewhat paradoxically in relation to their erudition, humanists were typically ‘engaged’ intellectuals. This meant that they sought to put ancient wisdom to work in a wide variety of modern contexts, seeking models for everything from mining technologies to warfare, control of the passions, love and friendship, state and government, and political rule and the giving of political advice.Footnote 7 Often they did so outside of the university, but in Northern Europe they were commonly professors. In this regard, it is important to observe that early modern European universities were not founded on or governed by the ideal of the free exercise of individual reason. Rather, they were institutions where learning was placed at the disposal of churches and princes, with the arts faculty furnishing students with the linguistic skills and basic knowledge necessary to undertake studies in the higher faculties of law, theology and medicine.Footnote 8 In the German Empire, universities were thus designed to supply princely territorial states with trained clergy, jurists, officials and teachers, educated in accordance with the religious and ideological needs of particular states, under the supervision of political and religious officials.Footnote 9 Pufendorf’s three universities – Leipzig in Saxony that he attended as a student, Heidelberg in the Palatinate where he held the first chair in natural law and philology, and Lund in Sweden where he lectured in natural law and history – were of this kind. In this setting, it was not unusual for academics to act as theological officials for churches or political secretaries for princes, or for the career of a political humanist to combine academic scholarship with political service to princely courts, contexts that were quite porous to each other. In threading his way between academic appointments at Heidelberg and Lund, and service as official historian and political adviser first to the Swedish then to the Brandenburg court, Pufendorf’s career exemplified that of the early modern political humanist.
Thanks to Fiammetta Palladini’s research on Pufendorf’s library we have something approaching a concrete picture of the spread and depth of his learning.Footnote 10 In her synoptic discussion,Footnote 11 based on an analysis of the library’s auction catalogue, Palladini reports that the library consisted of 1,663 volumes, containing approximately 2,000 separate works, considered thus to be of middling size for private scholarly libraries of the period. Seventy per cent of the volumes were in Latin, 9% in French, 8.5% German, 5.5% Greek, 3.5% Italian, 1% in Swedish, and then a small scatter of Dutch, English, Hebrew, Spanish and Danish works. In terms of the disciplinary composition of the library, historical works formed the largest category, comprising 427 (22.34%) of the approximately 2,000 separate works. The second-largest grouping was the juristic, consisting of 348 titles (18%), with Palladini also including some political and moral philosophy in this group, in addition to natural law and public law. Third in size was a grouping of 257 works (13.44%) consisting of medical and natural-philosophical works, including titles dealing with chemistry, alchemy, botany, zoology, mineralogy, pharmacology, geology and physics. Following in fourth place at 245 titles (12.8%) were works of philosophy broadly construed, with political philosophy dominating. The fifth largest grouping consisted of works of philology, ancient history and classical texts, consisting of 193 works (10%). Theological works comprised the sixth-largest group, containing 176 works (9%), including works of moral theology, biblical philology and kabbalistic works. In seventh place at 116 works (or just above 6%) came Pufendorf’s collection of neo-Latin literature and modern works in national vernaculars. The eighth group consisted of miscellaneous works or unclassified works, making up 65 titles (3.4%), and then in ninth and tenth place came works dedicated to mathematics, geometry, astronomy and architecture, comprising 24 titles (1.25%) and forming the smallest group. In a summary comment, Palladini characterizes Pufendorf’s library as that of a working humanist:
The Pufendorfian library was a working library. That means that in the first instance he had at his disposal the books that he used for his own writing (history, law, philosophy and theology); secondly works that represented the basis of humanistic culture in which he also participated (classics and philology); third Pufendorf also owned works of conversational-literature (modern and neo-Latin literature, including travel literature which provided him with supporting anthropological material for his natural law works).Footnote 12
A significant consequence of Pufendorf’s humanistic learning is that his various writings do not form a unified system. This was a characteristic shared with other humanists such as Erasmus, Lipsius, Montaigne, Vossius and Grotius, and observing this is in no sense a criticism. Rather, it is a pointer to the fact that, unlike metaphysical philosophers, humanists did not regard knowledge as constituting a unity grounded in abstract principles, but as a house of many mansions through which the humanist roamed, gathering the intellectual materials, arts and methods needed for particular purposes and occasions.Footnote 13 It was quite foreign for humanists in general and Pufendorf in particular to think of knowledge as forming a unity due to its grounding in something called reason. Pufendorf thus turned his back on the model of intellectual unity provided by the scholastic model of man’s rational participation in God’s divine intellection of all possible things. Neither did he show any interest in the modern variant of this model that had been improvised by another Leipzig graduate, the metaphysician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and then turned into a scholastic programme by the latter’s follower, Christian Wolff. Reason for Pufendorf was not an essence or faculty that man shared with God and through which all things could be known. It was only a generic name for man’s capacity to learn and think by reading books, making observations and experiments, and drawing conclusions.
This meant that what counted as rational knowledge differed between domains characterized by different arts of reasoning, which in turn led to the cultivation of an eclectic and polymathic intellectual disposition. The dispersed and domain-specific character of reason also allowed Pufendorf to carve out an important domain of knowledge – knowledge of God – that was not based in reason at all, but rather in the divinely revealed truths of the Bible. Pufendorf thus rejected the various programmes to harmonize philosophy and theology, ‘reason’ and ‘revelation’, that characterized scholastic and modern metaphysics.Footnote 14 Instead, like the Lutheran Pietists with whom he was closely associated, Pufendorf declared that, as the result of their flawed intellectual faculties, humans could have no rational insight into God’s reasoning or mind. Knowledge of the divine will could thus only be obtained through biblical revelation, while knowledge of natural and human things had its own sources in erudition, observation and reasoning.Footnote 15 Pufendorf’s unswerving commitment to a biblically based Lutheran faith was thus neither the foundation of his ‘observational’ natural law nor in tension with it.Footnote 16 Rather, it constituted an adjacent way of intellectual and moral life, dedicated to the pursuit of eternal happiness rather than civil well-being. For these reasons Pufendorf’s writings in the discursive or disciplinary fields that he mastered – natural law, imperial public law, philology, history and theology – do not constitute a unified system with a single philosophical or methodological foundation, not even when several of them are present within one work. They form instead an array of intellectual endeavours held together by Pufendorf’s humanist learning and the circumstances and purposes that called it into action.
Pufendorf’s intellectual profile is thus not that of the genius philosopher who discovers in scrutinizing their own mind fundamental principles supposedly capable of founding or revolutionizing state, society and church.Footnote 17 Rather, it is that of the political humanist who investigated a vast array of ancient and modern writings in order to assemble the intellectual arts, examples, wording and tools that he needed to engage with the problems that confronted him at the interface of his academic and political offices.Footnote 18 Nevertheless, Pufendorf’s erudite adaptation of ancient wisdom to modern problems and circumstances was actually more urgent, fraught and telling than a good deal of the supposedly society-shattering thought ascribed to the heroes of philosophy. In fact, Pufendorf’s work was driven by a cascading series of conflicts, exigencies and unplanned opportunities. As a result, the intellectual instruments that he improvised and the works that he fashioned were typically in the service of some political, religious or academic agenda, and hence frequently in conflict with those supporting rival agendas. That said, it is possible to discern amid his diverse works a certain abiding intellectual and moral disposition. This was formed by the manner in which he used his erudition firstly to provide a secular or civil grounding for a state capable of governing multiple religions, and secondly to defend a biblically based pietistic form of Protestant theology and religion.
2. Education and Formation
Born into a Lutheran clerical household in the middle of the Thirty Years War, it is perhaps not surprising that Pufendorf became committed to the cultural and political defence of Protestantism against political Catholicism, and to the stabilizing and pacifying role of the sovereign territorial state. These two life-long commitments, coupled with his exposure to the intermittent war between Sweden and Denmark, arising from his service to the Swedish court, meant that Pufendorf’s central writings – in the areas of natural law, political history and theology – would never be free of the interests that drove them and the conflicts that shaped them. That is what makes these works so interesting and challenging, and their author so multifaceted and engaging, as the contributions to this volume make clear. In order to bring this unusual figure into sharper focus, and to introduce the ensuing chapters dedicated to particular aspects of his writings and life, it is necessary to say a little more firstly about Pufendorf’s formation as a political humanist and secondly about the itinerary of his career and writings.
Pufendorf was born on 8 January 1632 in the Saxon village of Dorfchemnitz, where his father was a Lutheran pastor, before becoming pastor to the nearby village of Flöha in 1633. As an overwhelmingly Lutheran princely territorial state, Saxony was subject to the depredations of the Thirty Years War. In 1637 the Flöha parsonage was plundered and the family threatened by soldiers of the Catholic imperial army. A renewal of this threat in 1639 saw the Pufendorfs temporarily flee the town.Footnote 19 Presumably, these events made a significant impression on the young Samuel, perhaps imprinting his abiding concerns with the vulnerability of the Protestant religion and the protective role of the sovereign territorial state.
Pufendorf’s formal schooling began in 1645 when he was sent to the grammar school in Grimma, following in the footsteps of one of his older brothers, Esaias. Grimma was an elite grammar school (Fürstenschule), teaching the classical texts and philology, and functioning as a feeder-school for the University of Leipzig. There is little remaining evidence about the curriculum and pedagogy at Grimma, but we do know from Pufendorf’s later complaints that he was drilled in logic, grammar and rhetoric. We also know, courtesy of an anecdote about its theft, that he kept a commonplace book, in which students were encouraged to transcribe extracts culled from their reading of the classical texts. The keeping of such books was a key feature of humanistic learning. This literate practice was intended to build-up a copia, or storehouse, of stylistic exemplars, historical narratives, famous lives, moral adages, philosophemes and political examples on which humanists could draw when composing discourses for a wide variety of circumstances and purposes.
By the time that the 18-year-old Pufendorf enrolled at the University of Leipzig in 1650 – the same year that Swedish occupying forces vacated the city – he was thus already fully embarked on the path of Protestant humanistic learning that would now be further developed through eight years of academic study. The foremost scholar of Pufendorf’s time at Leipzig has observed that almost nothing is known about his course of studies there.Footnote 20 Nonetheless, a good deal can be deduced from Döring’s account of the Leipzig curriculum and teaching, which can in turn be partially verified through the records of Pufendorf’s contributions to the scholarly society to which he belonged – the Collegium Anthologicum. Setting aside the medical faculty, the most important disciplines taught at Leipzig during the 1650s were classical philology, historiography, theology and jurisprudence. The evidence from Pufendorf’s contributions to the Collegium suggests that his driving concerns were with classical philology and history, with his interest in theology being centred in biblical philology, but there is no evidence that he attended lectures in jurisprudence.
That said, it must be kept in mind that the philological study of the classics by no means excluded the study of modern history, politics, law and philosophy, since philology was fundamentally a way of studying texts and documents of any kind in their historical settings. The historian of philosophy Jacob Thomasius, who joined the Leipzig arts faculty in 1652, thus not only lectured on ancient pagan philosophers and early Christian theologians, but also offered lectures on Hobbes, Gassendi, Descartes and Spinoza, indicating his willingness to critically engage with a series of modern philosophers, all of whom would feature in Pufendorf’s major natural law work, the De jure naturae et gentium of 1672.Footnote 21 Pufendorf’s studies at Leipzig would seem to have traversed a similar array of ancient and modern texts and disciplines. Despite their focus in classical texts, source criticism and biblical philology, his philological studies were open to modern writers, while his biblical theology seems to have been informed by the anti-Catholic, anti-Syncretist and anti-Calvinist outlook of Leipzig Lutheranism.
This conjecture finds significant confirmation in the 53 lectures that Pufendorf presented to the Collegium Anthologicum. These presentations were grounded in philological method and used many of the ancient and modern authors who would appear in Pufendorf’s mature works – from Apuleius, Aristotle and Bodin, through Casaubon, Cicero, Conring, Diodorus Siculus, Erasmus and Grotius, and extending to Herodotus, Lucretius, Luther, Pliny, Plutarch, Polybius, Scaliger, Suetonius and Tacitus. Demonstrating the flexibility of the humanist approach, Pufendorf addressed a variety of topics that would continue to preoccupy him. These included the translation of the title Romanum imperium to the German Empire (III), the etymology of the term (papal) ‘Bull’ (V), the origins of political authority (VI), the Bible as the putative source of ancient traditions (XIII), the rule of the pharaohs (XV), the political history of the Persians (XII, XIII), biblical exegesis (XXVI, XXVII, XXXV) and the reciprocal influencing of pagan and early Christian writings (XLV).Footnote 22 This collection, adaptation and application of ancient and modern authors as intellectual resources for engaging with a variety of historical, political and religious problems would prove typical of Pufendorf’s work as a political humanist.
Pufendorf’s time at Leipzig provides a vignette of what it was like to be an emerging humanist in a Protestant university in the German Empire in the immediate aftermath of the Thirty Years War. Leipzig was important not just for the intellectual networks that nourished Pufendorf’s erudite humanism but also for the networks of political patronage that would help to determine how his erudition would be put to work and for what purposes. Prominent in Pufendorf’s intellectual network were the other young scholars in the Collegium Anthologicum, his life-long mentor and friend Erhard Weigel, and someone who would become a life-long intellectual enemy: the future Lutheran metaphysician and theologian Valentin Alberti, also a member of the Collegium. The most important network of political patronage at Leipzig was that formed by a group of students drawn from the Swedish nobility – scions of the occupying Swedish military and diplomatic officials – among whom Otto Wilhelm von Königsmark would be particularly important for Pufendorf’s future career. No doubt guided by his brother Esaias, who was in Swedish diplomatic service, Pufendorf sought Königsmark’s support and patronage, successfully it would seem. Thanks to this network and his brother’s negotiations on his behalf, and in the absence of better prospects, Pufendorf obtained his first career position when he was hired as house-tutor by the Swedish ambassador in Copenhagen, Peter Julius Coyet, leaving Leipzig and Saxony for good in 1658.Footnote 23
3. Life and Works
The intersection between exigent political circumstances and Pufendorf’s intellectual work as a political humanist is illustrated by the immediate subsequent events. For no sooner had Pufendorf arrived in Copenhagen than he was caught up in the chaos of the first Nordic War between Sweden and Denmark. During the Swedish siege and naval bombardment of the Danish capital, Pufendorf, along with most of Coyet’s household and the Swedish ambassador Sten Bielke, was arrested and imprisoned in the Copenhagen town hall, being held there from August 1658 to April 1659. It is a mark of Pufendorf’s persistence and of the circumstances under which he worked that during the eight months of his imprisonment he completed his first major work, the Elementorum jurisprudentiae universalis (Elements of Universal Jurisprudence), which was published in 1660. Lacking access to his source texts, and relying instead on his memory, the Elements is noteworthy for being the least humanist of Pufendorf’s works, using the ‘mathematical’ method of axioms, deductions and conclusions, rather than the humanist method of developing positions through copious engagement with ancient and modern texts.
The lack of a humanist approach was one of the points of criticism with which this work was soon met, but this was part of a wider critical reaction that would have significance for Pufendorf’s future work and, indeed, for the development of natural law discourse in general. The Elements attracted the keen attention of Johann Christian von Boineburg, minister and close advisor to the Elector of Mainz, Prince-Bishop Johann Phillipp von Schönborn.Footnote 24 Boineburg had converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism in 1653 in order to obtain the post at Schönborn’s Catholic court, a position that enabled him to assemble a large network, mainly of scholars, to work on his project for an ecumenical encyclopaedic ‘true science’. This was intended to encompass all disciplines concerned with humanity: ethics, politics, jurisprudence, history, theology.Footnote 25 His lodestar for this enterprise was Grotius, and the aim was to assemble the intellectual basis for a post-confessional Christian social order. Struck by Pufendorf’s Elements and provoked by its distance from his own view of Grotius, Boineburg tried in vain during the early 1660s to draw Pufendorf into a closer discussion and disclosure of his ideas. Boineburg failed in this, but the effect of the encounter was that Boineburg concentrated even more on the shaping of a non-confessional Christian natural law and on the interpretation of Grotius to suit this purpose. Among Boineburg’s many initiatives to achieve this end he commissioned his former teacher at Helmstedt, Johann Heinrich Boecler, to write a major commentary on Grotius, using John Selden’s natural law as his model.Footnote 26 Boineburg’s circle also included Samuel Rachel, who became the first professor of natural law when the University of Kiel was founded in 1665.Footnote 27
Many others shared Boineburg’s search for a natural law based upon Scripture, and as Gábor Gángó has shown, what Boineburg achieved was the creation of a new school of Christian natural law that engaged with Pufendorf earlier than hitherto assumed and from the very beginning of the latter’s natural law work.Footnote 28 However, the non-confessional aims of the Mainzer minister were often set aside, with ‘Christian’ natural law assuming an orthodox Lutheran form in some settings, and it was not least from this quarter that Pufendorf was attacked, as we see explained in Fiammetta Palladini’s Chapter 11. This overt confessionalization was not the case, though, with the young Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz who late in Boineburg’s life became a close collaborator in the latter’s ecumenical projects. Leibniz pursued the reunion of Christianity by attempting to provide it with a supra-confessional metaphysics, which he also hoped would serve as the basis for a universal natural law.Footnote 29 In his retrospectively famous attack on Pufendorf at the turn of the century,Footnote 30 Leibniz was thus engaging in a late skirmish in a long running intellectual battle between Christian and ‘secular’ natural law, as discussed by Knud Haakonssen in the volume’s final chapter. For Pufendorf, the encyclopaedic nature of Boineburg’s project would at least have reinforced the need for a wider intellectual arsenal than he had available in the writing of the Elements. And not least, Boineburg’s virtual obsession with Grotius had made sure that it was unavoidable to engage deeply with the Dutchman’s work.
There was at least one decidedly humanist feature of the Elements, however, namely its dedication to the newly restored Prince Elector of the Palatinate, Karl Ludwig. Written in Holland, where Pufendorf had decamped with Coyet in September 1659, the dedication was designed to catch the eye and win the patronage of the Palatine prince. This was with a view to obtaining a chair at the newly reopened University of Heidelberg, an erstwhile Protestant humanist university that had ceased to function between 1632 and 1652, following the military defeat of the Palatinate by imperial forces in 1622.Footnote 31 In this attempt Pufendorf was in luck. After some preliminary jockeying between the prince and the university senate over whether the newcomer might obtain a prestigious chair in law, in the autumn of 1661 he was instead appointed to a newly minted chair in natural law and philology in the arts faculty – the first named chair in natural law in Europe.
As we learn from Joachim Whaley’s Chapter 2, Pufendorf’s appointment to the reopened university formed part of a larger set of measures undertaken by Karl Ludwig – measures to restore the Palatine economy, enlarge its population and boost its skills – with a view to reconstructing the country following its devastation during the Thirty Years War. As Whaley explains, in the Palatinate Pufendorf found himself in a Protestant princely state that had been conquered by Catholic forces, that remained under pressure from political Catholicism, and in which the Calvinist ruling house had to govern a mixed Calvinist, Lutheran and Catholic population. These were circumstances that spoke directly to several of Pufendorf’s core political, religious and intellectual concerns. In responding to these issues in his next major work, De statu imperii germanici (The Present State of Germany) of 1667, Pufendorf provided a conspectus of the constitutional and political order of the German Empire in the post-war period. Written in full political humanist mode, and in the assumed persona of an Italian traveller, Severinus de Monzambano, Pufendorf displayed an erudite command of imperial constitutional law and used this to intervene acerbically in a series of debates over the empire’s political status. Leaving behind the ‘mathematical’ method of the Elements, Pufendorf instead worked in the idioms of political and constitutional historiography, focusing on the ‘irregular’ structure of the empire as a loose federation of states and estates, which he notoriously characterized as ‘like a monster’ (monstro simile).Footnote 32 But despite the initial notoriety, Pufendorf’s work had a much greater impact throughout the eighteenth century than has subsequently been understood, as Whaley shows.
In Pufendorf’s next move, we find a similar mix of intellectual prowess, the search for patronage and preferment, and direct engagement with local political and religious circumstance. The ambitious scholar had not given up on his desire for a prestigious law professorship, and he realized this goal in 1667 with his appointment to such a chair at the Swedish University of Lund. This appointment was facilitated through the network of Swedish nobles that Pufendorf had been cultivating since Leipzig, and through the good offices of his brother Esaias, now occupying senior roles in the Swedish diplomatic service. Pufendorf worked at Lund until 1676 and in this period devoted his intellectual energy to refurbishing the discipline of natural law, writing the two works on which his reputation would subsequently depend: the massive De jure naturam et gentium (Law of Nature and Nations) of 1672 (rev. 1684), and the abbreviated teaching-text that he derived from it, De officio hominis et civis (The Duty of Man and Citizen) of 1673. These pre-eminent works of Protestant natural law drew on the pioneering works of Hobbes and Grotius, but also critically interrogated them in the humanist manner.Footnote 33 This resulted in two works characterized by striking methodological and substantive originality, as Pufendorf sought to reset the parameters for politics and ethics within the horizon of civil sovereignty.
In Chapter 3, on Pufendorf’s method, Michael J. Seidler shows that Pufendorf’s way of arguing his case and persuading his readers was developed in relation to particular circumstances and purposes. In his natural law works Pufendorf was attempting to provide a new and solid foundation for ethics and politics, while eschewing the authoritarianism of scholastic natural law and avoiding some of the more naturalistic dimensions of Hobbes’s approach. Seidler draws no sharp distinction between Pufendorf’s use of the ‘mathematical’ method in the Elements and the humanist method of the Law of Nature. He focuses instead on Pufendorf’s development of a ‘composite’ method grounded in widely accepted principles and observations, and aimed at allowing readers of different political and religious persuasions to reach a shared ethical outlook. In clarifying this search for a consensus-inducing arrangement of the basic principles and materials of natural law, Seidler cites Pufendorf’s own comment that his method consists ‘not so much in ascertaining new truths as in refining and precisely arranging [concinna methodo adornandis] old ones, or in artfully organizing things heretofore scattered and confused, and stabilizing them by means of demonstrations’.Footnote 34 Seidler shows us how Pufendorf deduced the natural law by assembling the widest array of relevant observations from which principles could be derived, and then using the principles to provide solid foundations for the observations.
In Chapter 4, Thomas Ahnert is also concerned with Pufendorf’s attempt to provide a demonstrative scientific basis for ethics and politics in the Law of Nature, focusing in particular on the role of the crucial ‘moral entities’ (entia moralia) doctrine in this regard. Pufendorf used the term moral entities to refer to an array of statuses, offices and personae, such as husband and wife, parent and child, soldier and civilian, priest and layperson, citizen and ruler. He treated these as the means by which individuals acquire the obligations, rights and powers that shape and warrant their ability to act in a particular ethical or political capacity. Ahnert’s chapter goes to the heart of Pufendorf’s construction of moral entities, which is their difference from physical entities. Unlike man’s physical being, which was created complete by God, man’s moral nature was ‘imposed’ on top of this in the form of moral entities designed to govern man’s conduct and dignify his way of life. Nonetheless, despite their ‘imposed’ or ‘instituted’ character, since they are kinds of ‘being’ (ens), Ahnert argues that moral entities possess a ‘metaphysical foundation’ and an ontological character from which moral judgments follow necessarily. Without this ontological or metaphysical character, Ahnert argues, it would have been impossible for Pufendorf to reconstitute natural law as a demonstrative moral science, for the premises of his moral syllogisms would have lacked the ontological certainty required to issue in demonstrably true propositional conclusions.
Ian Hunter’s discussion in Chapter 5 of the role of human nature and the natural condition in Pufendorf’s construction of natural law also begins with the moral entities doctrine. For Pufendorf, Hunter argues, the fact that man’s moral nature is imposed on top of a created physical nature that is already complete means that humans can have no insight into God’s reasons for this imposition. For while physics provides knowledge of the physical nature that God has created for man, and while metaphysics claims to provide rational insight into a ‘being’ or ontology common to God and man, in being gratuitously ‘superadded’ to these physical and metaphysical natures – rather than being developed from them – man’s moral nature provides no insight into why God has imposed it. This in turn means that the divine origins of natural law can only be grounded in the post-facto deduction that, presumably, God would not have imposed this nature unless he had wanted his creature to live and live well. Man must thus derive the natural law by ‘observing’ the nature that he finds has been imposed on him, without having metaphysical insight into God’s reasons for imposing it. For this reason, Hunter argues, Pufendorf did not ground his natural law in a metaphysics of man’s constitutively rational and sociable nature but rather in an erudite compendium of man’s weak and needy human nature. From this emerges the picture of a being whose natural weakness requires him to be sociable to survive but whose naturally refractory, vicious and predatory character stands in the way of this. In culling these observations in the usual humanist manner from a variety of ancient and modern authors – Juvenal and Charron, Manilius and Cumberland, Libanius, Pliny, Horace and Quintilian – Pufendorf sought to assemble a conspectus of man’s moral nature capable of the broadest possible acceptance, and from this to draw out the natural law: that man has to cultivate sociality in order to survive and flourish. For Hunter’s Pufendorf, humans thus come to know the natural law through immanent reflection on the moral condition in which they find God has placed them for his own reasons.
The fact that man’s moral nature was imposed by God means that the cultivation of sociality is a universal human duty to which men are subject even in the state of nature. At the same time, however, since man has no clear insight into why God imposed this nature on him, or into how God intended him to cultivate sociality, it was left to man himself to invent and impose the ‘adventitious’ or artificial moral entities through which his conduct would be governed and his society organized. The instrument for this ongoing process of moral self-invention is the ‘pact’, pacts being agreements into which humans enter as the means of refashioning moral personhood for particular circumstances and purposes. Once Pufendorf has completed his deduction of the natural law, then the bulk of the Law of Nature is devoted to the artificial moral entities or statuses that man has invented and imposed on himself through pacts. Such are the statuses of language, property, marriage and the political status (status civilis).
In Chapter 6, on Pufendorf’s treatment of language and property, Pärtel Piirimäe prefaces his discussion with an account of Pufendorf’s view of pacts. For Pufendorf, Piirimäe observes, pacts do not take place between already fully formed moral subjects, but are themselves the means by which the rights, obligations and offices of subjects are formed. In providing the means by which humans invent and impose moral and social personae on themselves in order to achieve sociality, pacts are thus central to Pufendorf’s entire account of natural law. Pacting or promising not only gives rise to obligations directly between individuals, but also indirectly through the creation and imposition of such institutions as the family, language and property. These complex institutions are responsible for the maintenance of the rights and obligations of particular kinds of moral personae. In the case of language, Piirimäe comments that Pufendorf’s insistence on its pactual basis gives rise to a very distinctive account. This is in part because Pufendorf sees language as the communal effect of social interaction; when social sign-giving (whether verbal or otherwise) is understood, it has become common, and therein consists the ‘pact’ upon which further pacting can be built. This reciprocal relation between pacts and language makes them fundamental to the achievement of sociality as commanded by the natural law. But it also leads to Pufendorf’s unusual account of linguistic meaning as grounded in a pact which in turn makes the truthful use of language into a kind of social duty. Through this pact-based theory, Pufendorf rejects naturalistic understandings of language – where the meanings of words have been established by God or else agree with the essences of things – replacing them with a social and conventional account.
Piirimäe then argues that Pufendorf’s account of property assumes a similar form. Property is another institution that man has imposed on himself by means of pacts in order to preserve sociable relations with his fellows. Pufendorf thus rejected accounts of property emerging through division of an originally existing communal property, insisting instead that what can count as property, and the rights and obligations of ownership, are institutions imposed de novo through pacts, depending on such factors as scarcity and the uses to which goods could be put. This construction, Piirimäe shows, permitted Pufendorf to contribute to one of the most controversial early modern property arguments – ownership of the seas (dominium maris). Here, Pufendorf argued that whether and to what degree the seas could be turned into property depended not just on pacts and agreements, but also on whether the conditions of scarcity and exhaustibility of resources applied. Finally, Piirimäe observes that Pufendorf viewed price and value as similarly dependent on agreement of pacts and governed by the end of sociality. For Pufendorf, price was thus another imposed moral entity, specifically, a ‘moral quantity’ or agreed mode of measuring value, without which economic exchange and the further development of society would not be possible.
Pacts also play a central role in Simone Zurbuchen’s discussion of Pufendorf’s account of marriage and the family in Chapter 7. Zurbuchen begins by discussing Pufendorf’s view of the family as the only pre-civil society, that is, the only society existing in the state of nature prior to the establishment of the civil state. This means that the family and the three molecular societies that it contains – those of husband and wife, parent and child, and master and slave or servant (servus) – are subject to forms of rule or authority initially independent of the sovereignty (summum imperium) that will be formed with the civil state. Despite existing in the natural condition, however, not only are the three forms of familial authority imposed as moral entities by pacts, as Zurbuchen makes clear, but these pacts also establish the moral personae of husband and wife, parent and child, and master and servant, together with their reciprocal rights, obligations and duties.
Once again, Pufendorf sharpens his own pact-based account by criticizing writers who defended theological or naturalistic accounts of familial statuses and authority. In the case of the husband’s marital authority, for example, Pufendorf rejected J. F. Horn’s account of this as a form of sovereignty (summum imperium), flowing to the husband from God, and including the right of life and death. In Pufendorf’s account the matrimonial status, combining procreation with cohabitation, arose from the need to channel sexuality into sociable forms while securing certainty of paternity for child-rearing purposes. Zurbuchen shows that for Pufendorf, this could best be achieved through a mutual pact between the marriage partners, and the husband’s authority arose from this. In this pact the woman promised obedience to the man in matters pertaining to the procreational end of marriage, while the man promised to protect the woman in exchange, with the pact itself creating the personae of husband and wife, and restricting the husband’s powers accordingly. Similarly, in the case of parental authority, Pufendorf takes issue with Hobbes’s argument that since it originates in a natural right to everything in the state of nature, this authority must have originally belonged to the mother, who first had the infant in her power. Once again Pufendorf insists that a pact must intervene before this authority can arise, here in the form of a ‘tacit’ pact that we can assume would hold in which the child would agree to obey the parents in exchange for their care and protection. Zurbuchen observes that while Pufendorf’s patriarchal assumptions lead him to allocate parental power directly to the father and only derivatively to the mother, the tacit pact does limit the father’s powers to those required for the proper raising and education of the child to participate in society. Here Zurbuchen also clarifies the modification of paternal power attendant on entrance into the civil condition. For while the father’s powers in the state of nature extended even to the right of life and death over children, this right is removed once fathers delegate protection of life to the civil sovereign, thereby restricting parental authority to that established by the tacit ‘upbringing’ pact. Finally, Zurbuchen observes that in distinguishing servants from slaves, Pufendorf also founds and limits the authority of masters over servants in a pact or contract, namely that in which the master promises to provide for the servant if the latter agrees to work for him, again excluding the right of life and death.
In their discussion of Pufendorf’s construction of sovereignty and his account of the forms of government, Ian Hunter and Knud Haakonssen begin Chapter 8 with Pufendorf’s assertion that sovereignty and the civil state constitute the highest or most perfect forms of human society. This is not because they bring human nature to its moral perfection, but rather because they provide the highest form of something that the pre-civil societies of the family and patriarchal household offered in a lesser form, namely peace, security and social well-being. That said, the means of entrance into the civil condition (status civilis) is the same as that for entering into the familial statuses, that is, via the pact. Here again a central feature of Pufendorf’s use of the pact is that, rather than being a means of transferring pre-existing moral personalities (powers, rights and duties) into a new condition, the pact is the means by which humans institute or ‘impose’ new moral personae on themselves – new offices, rights and obligations – in accordance with the end or purposes of the pact itself. As Hunter and Haakonssen make clear, in treating it as something that brings the reciprocal rights and duties of the sovereign and citizen into existence – rather than marking the site of their consensual exchange or delegation – Pufendorf’s construction of the sovereignty pact differs markedly from most ‘social contract’ theorizing. Not only does this separate Pufendorf’s conception of sovereignty from scholastic and divine right theories – where sovereignty pre-exists the pact in the form of man’s rational nature or God’s divine will – but it also distinguishes his account from Hobbes’s, with which it otherwise has much in common.Footnote 35 For Pufendorf refuses to accept the Englishman’s account of sovereign power as resulting from a donation of powers and rights that individuals already possessed in the state of nature. Instead, he treats the sovereignty pact as something into which individuals are driven by mutual fear, and through which they seek to overcome their inherent political disunity, recalcitrance and fecklessness by renouncing their capacities for political decision and action in order to create a supreme political authority. As Pufendorf repeatedly points out, this means that the sovereign’s capacities for political decision and action belong to the artificial persona created by the pact. This makes them irreducible to the political will of the pact participants or, indeed, to the will of God, and hence answerable only to the end of sovereignty itself: the duty to provide security to those who entered into the pact. Hunter and Haakonssen observe that this construction of sovereignty has a striking consequence for Pufendorf’s view of the three standard early modern forms of government: monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. Since the legitimacy of sovereignty is determined by the security that it provides rather than by a moral will that it enacts – regardless of whether this is supposed to be the will of God, human reason, or the people – then, to the extent that each permits the exercise of sovereignty, all three forms of government are equally legitimate.
Pufendorf devotes considerable attention to the means by which and the extent to which the state can secure sociality. In Chapter 9, on the civil order, Knud Haakonssen shows how Pufendorf applies his basic architecture of a deep caesura between the natural and the civil state. Following the sovereignty pact, the effect of the edict of government and pact of submission is the imposition or institution of two new and reciprocally related moral personae, the sovereign and the citizen. Pufendorf’s sovereign is defined by a right to command and punish for the purposes of protecting the citizens, while his citizen is defined by the obligation to obey in exchange for this protection. This means that the legitimacy of the sovereign’s legislative power does not rest on the consent of citizens carrying natural rights with them into the state, but on the exercise of that power for the end of sovereignty: civil peace and flourishing. Civil duties, obligations and rights arise when the sovereign issues the necessary parts of natural law with civil authority and supplements such legislation with purely positive law. The underlying argument is that in the persona of a citizen, i.e., for the purposes of civic life, the will of the individual has been replaced by that of the sovereign, so that the sovereign power can dispose over the lives and livelihood of citizens to secure the purpose of the state, social peace. This includes the duty to render military service if needed, and it means subjection to punishment for the sake of domestic peace. Pufendorf’s remarkable theory of punishment is a cornerstone in his political thought. Rejecting all ideas of a right to punish based on universal moral qualities or rights – including Hobbes’s idea of a natural right of self-defence – Pufendorf distinguishes between punishment as reparation for an injury done and as security against injurious intent. The former is a factual matter that in principle can be measured (a ‘moral quantity’) and made up for, but the latter is beset by the uncertainty arising from the inaccessibility and unpredictability of another person’s mind, and it is therefore the core of natural insecurity and key to the need for an overriding power. Given humanity’s ignorance and disagreement about divine punishment, the might of the sovereign is the best possible means of making the potentially injurious person’s mind predictable. Punishment is a purely civic invention for the purposes of social peace; it has no inherent relationship to the crime, such as proportionality, which can play a role only for prudential reasons. It makes no sense to speak of the criminal’s right or duty to be punished nor of moral desert, so both Grotius and Socrates are rejected.
Haakonssen shows that Pufendorf’s weighty treatment of punishment is symmetrical with a substantial theory of social value or estimation of people; that is to say, sociality is implemented not only negatively but also positively. Social esteem as a ‘moral quantity’, Pufendorf argues, arises from common subjection to the natural law, which means that all people must treat each other with equal regard, due to their capacity to follow the law, and as the condition of sociable relations. Unless we esteem people in this basic sense, we reject their humanity and in that regard their equality. There is thus no talk of an inherent human dignity; the estimation is relational between persons constituted through their subjection to natural law and is the absolute zero in morals that is presupposed in any other relations. This simple esteem is transformed to a civic esteem in civil society, namely that prima facie all are equal in their personae as citizens, i.e., subject to the sovereign power. Inequalities of status and esteem can arise in civil life owing to the different estimations of the contributions made to the preservation and enhancement of society. It is stressed that civil esteem can be claimed or awarded only as an imperfect right, as a matter of prudence.
In Mads Langballe Jensen’s Chapter 10 on Pufendorf’s account of jus gentium, or the law of nations, we enter into a transitional space. This is in part because Pufendorf’s treatment of the law of nations places it on the outer limit of his discussion of natural law, casting doubt on whether the jus gentium actually amounts to law in the proper sense. And it is in part because Jensen completes his chapter with a discussion of how Pufendorf used natural law arguments in political polemics, at which point we pass over into the domain of Pufendorf’s political-historical writings. With regard to the first point, Jensen clarifies the reasons that led Pufendorf to depart from Grotius’s path-breaking discussion of jus gentium by declaring that there was no ‘positive’ law of nations. By this Pufendorf meant that there is no binding or enforceable international law to which states were subject, apart from the obligations of the law of nature. Since sovereign states emerged as ‘compound moral persons’ from the sovereignty pact, and since this pact gave the sovereign as ‘superior’ sole right to determine how natural law should be enacted as the commands or positive laws of a territorial ruler, then there could be no supra-territorial superior above such a ruler, hence no positive international law. As Jensen shows, this meant that Pufendorf regarded states as exemplifying the condition of human individuals in the state of nature (status naturalis). It also meant that while, like individuals in this condition, states were obliged by the natural law to seek peace, the fact that this obligation could not be enforced by a superior meant that it remained weak. In the state of nature only one of the two conditions for proper obligation to natural law could be fulfilled, viz. the rationale for adhering to the law, but not the power needed to enforce adherence. Between states, the law of nature thus gives rise not to laws but to promissory treaties which, because of each sovereign’s duty to protect his own territorial population, could be abrogated when they no longer served the state interest. The gap that thus emerged between jus gentium as the law of nature applied to states and the states’ pursuit of their own interests could only be filled by a political or diplomatic casuistry, that is, by situational judgments in which sovereigns should moderate the pursuit of their own state’s interest through prudential acknowledgement of the rules governing the conduct of war and the making of peace. Jensen provides insight into how Pufendorf himself adapted natural-law jus gentium to political circumstance in a number of texts that he wrote in defence of Swedish state interest. In one of these polemics, Gunde the Danish Yapper of 1659, Pufendorf responded to a Danish defence of the detention of the Swedish ambassador and the Coyet household, including Pufendorf himself, during the Swedish naval attack on Copenhagen in 1658. Despite being written at the same time as Pufendorf’s austere ‘mathematical’ Elements of Universal Jurisprudence, Jensen shows that Gunde made full use of the casuistical latitude permitted by non-binding jus gentium. This permitted Pufendorf to argue, for example, that since the Danes had never fulfilled all the conditions of a prior peace treaty with Sweden, the two countries were not actually at peace, allowing Sweden to attack Denmark without needing to declare war. If jus gentium was the application of the law of nature to the relations between states, then, in the absence of an international superior and positive international law, there was plenty of room for the political humanist to adjust the law of nature to the exigencies of state interest.
It is fitting that the sequence of chapters dealing with Pufendorf’s natural law should be completed by Fiammetta Palladini’s discussion of the Eris Scandica, or Scandinavian Controversy, in Chapter 11. Not only does Palladini provide readers with a unique insight into this least known of Pufendorf’s major works, but she also reveals another side of Pufendorf – the no-holds-barred polemicist. In doing so, she also replicates Pufendorf’s own intention in publishing the Eris Scandica in 1686, taking the opportunity to clarify and defend his natural law against the relentless academic salvos that had targeted it since the publication of the Law of Nature at Lund in 1672. The Pufendorf captured so vividly in Palladini’s portrait – and so lucidly rendered in David Saunders’ elegant translation – is of a figure combining two personae not normally seen in such intimate proximity: the violent polemicist raking his academic enemies with withering intellectual fire, and the intellectual virtuoso defending a highly original body of doctrine. As Palladini observes, part of the reason for Pufendorf’s ferocity lay in the charge of heresy that had been levelled against him by two of his Lund colleagues, the jurist Nikolaus Beckmann and the theologian Josua Schwartz. In combining Lutheran theology, metaphysics and Christian natural law, Beckmann’s and Schwartz’s work exemplified Protestant scholasticism. This was never more apparent than when they attacked Pufendorf for failing to ground natural law in man’s innocent or integral condition – allowing the law to be derived from a divine justice and holiness embodied in man as the imago Dei – and erroneously attempting to ground it in man’s factual nature as a social creature, thereby following the heretic Hobbes.Footnote 36
In returning fire, the Eris Scandica was thus not just a defence of Pufendorf’s natural law, it was also an onslaught against that which his natural law had been directed in the first place: a scholastic or Christian natural law whose mixing of religious and civil authority threatened to issue in a dangerous religious coercion.Footnote 37 As Palladini explains, this sent Pufendorf back to his point of departure: his limitation of natural law to the end of securing humanity’s worldly happiness, and thence its radical separation from moral theology whose end is humanity’s salvation and eternal beatitude. In the same vein, in rejecting the scholastic grounding of natural law in the biblical Adam’s paradisal state, Pufendorf declared his natural law must apply to all men, not just Christians, in doing so treating his own account of man’s miserable, vicious and yet needy nature as a ‘fiction’ designed to ground a particular model of civil authority. At the same time, he views this fiction as a fundamental hypothesis, grounded in undeniable observations, and capable of supporting the basic propositions of natural law. In discussing Pufendorf’s treatment of man’s moral nature as ‘imposed’ and ‘super-added’ to his physical nature, Palladini again brings out the fundamental importance of Pufendorf’s moral entities doctrine, and his implacable will to defend it against his scholastic detractors using a formidable mix of ridicule and insult, but also lucid explication and argument. For his scholastic enemies, in treating man’s moral nature as imposed, and hence not grounded in a moral ontology that linked human to divine being, Pufendorf’s moral entities doctrine was utterly beyond the pale. For them, this meant not only that human actions lacked moral value until a law had been imposed on them (the charge of ‘indifferentism’ that they levelled against him), but also that in the absence of an ontologically grounded morality or justice, God could change human morality at will, and his own actions could not themselves be understood as just.
Palladini observes that Pufendorf’s response to these charges takes us to the heart of his moral entities doctrine and its central role in his natural law. Pufendorf thus explains that the fact that man’s moral nature is divinely imposed does not make the natural law or morality arbitrary and changeable, since, without being privy to the divine mind, we may still presume that God imposed this nature so that his creature could survive and flourish, which means that he would have no reason to seek to change this nature or the natural law flowing from it. That being the case, the natural law that man derives through observing this nature – that man must cultivate sociality in order to survive – cannot attract the charge of indifferentism because the obligations and rights flowing from man’s natural condition are present from birth, even if not innate. With regards to whether this conception of human justice allows us to conceive of God as just, Pufendorf responds that since God’s justice flows from his perfect nature and he is not bound by obligations and rights, divine justice bears only a dim analogy to human justice and lies outside human knowledge and beyond the this-worldly concerns of natural law.
In Chapter 12, Walter Sparn introduces us to a Pufendorf who is even less familiar to us than the political humanist and the natural jurist: Pufendorf the lay Lutheran theologian operating in the tense religious circumstances of the 1680s. As Sparn explains, these circumstances were formed by France’s suspension of religious toleration in 1685, the consequent influx of French Calvinist (Huguenot) refugees into Berlin, and, at a further remove, the tensions between the Lutheran and Reformed (Calvinist) religions in Germany, and, finally, tensions within Lutheranism arising from its official confession, the Formula of Concord of 1557. In his account of Pufendorf’s responses to this complex context, Sparn again reminds us that rather than forming a system grounded in a foundational philosophy, Pufendorf’s writings constituted a linked array of responses to different circumstances, drawing on a variety of different disciplinary sources. The two major theological works that he wrote in the late 1680s – Of the Nature and Qualification of Religion in Reference to Civil Society (pub. 1687) and The Divine Feudal Law (pub. 1695) – thus were not grounded in his natural law, even though they drew important doctrines from that source. But neither were they grounded in a metaphysics or natural theology that unified ‘reason’ and ‘faith’, whether in the manner of Lutheran scholasticism or in that of Leibniz’s updated version. As Sparn makes clear, that is because while he endorsed natural religion – understood as grounded in a universal rational capacity to know God and his providential governance of the world – Pufendorf insisted on the indispensability of a revealed biblical religion as the condition of salvation, with Lutheranism providing the closest approximation of the true religion, to the exclusion of Catholicism.
Sparn shows that in his Nature of Religion, Pufendorf drew on the Law of Nature’s moral entities doctrine, using this to differentiate the moral personae or ‘offices’ of ruler and teacher, and using this in turn to separate the end of the state (security) from that of the church (salvation). This was with a view to precluding religious coercion, which Pufendorf identified with papalism, but also to establishing the relative autonomy of the church as an independent association or ‘college’ within the state. At the same time, in using the Bible to ground the role of the teacher in the figure of Christ the saviour, Pufendorf was showing how the ‘secularizing’ effects of restricting natural law to the end of civil peace could coexist with a pious commitment to salvation grounded in biblical faith, with Pufendorf repudiating all attempts to unify these in a natural theology or natural religion.Footnote 38 Pufendorf’s engagement with and reliance on Protestant biblical theology was even more pronounced in his Divine Feudal Law. For in this text, Pufendorf had to provide an outline of a theology that might reconcile the conflicting doctrines of the Lutheran and Reformed churches. This entailed excluding unassimilable doctrines, especially Reformed predestination, while declaring other potential stumbling blocks – such as the Lutheran doctrine of Christ’s ‘ubiquity’ in space and time – as non-fundamental in relation to salvation. As Sparn shows, Pufendorf’s way of threading this needle had nothing in common with Leibniz’s attempt to re-unify Christianity on the basis of a new (Leibnizian) metaphysics of the Eucharist.Footnote 39 Instead, Pufendorf outlined a biblically based covenantal or ‘federal’ theology – in which man is reconciled to God through a series of covenants outlined in the Old and New Testaments – with Pufendorf envisioning this as the theological ground on which Lutherans and Reformed might enter into judicial negotiations in order to develop a shared form of worship.
If Sparn’s account of Pufendorf the theologian challenges us to grasp the non-systemic, differentiated and engaged character of Pufendorf’s writings, then so too does Sebastian Olden-Jørgensen’s discussion of Pufendorf the political historian, comprising the penultimate chapter of the volume. For while the figure of the Protestant political humanist returns to centre-stage in Olden-Jørgensen’s account, Pufendorf’s humanistic erudition is changed yet again by the circumstances in which he had to put it to work as a political historian. Despite the fact that our author produced some of his political histories in Lund at the same time he was working on the Law of Nature, the histories, Olden-Jørgensen argues, should not be treated as ‘applied’ versions of the natural law, but as works with an independent grounding in documentary philology, historiography and political circumstance. In the histories, sovereignty is not approached in relation to a pact that establishes the duties of rulers and citizens, but in terms of the decisions and acts of historical rulers governed by political conditions and state interests. Further, in the documentary sources for Pufendorf’s histories, Cicero, Livy, Diodorus Siculus and the other classics receded into the background, to be replaced by contemporary sources detailing modern political, military and diplomatic developments. What remained constant, however, was Pufendorf’s vocation as a political humanist. He thus continued to place his philological and historical erudition in the circumstances that surrounded him, and at the disposal of the patrons who employed him. In explicating the context for Pufendorf’s first political history – the best-selling History of Europe of 1682 – Olden-Jørgensen explains that this work originated in Pufendorf’s teaching at Lund during the early 1670s and was addressed to an audience of young Swedish noblemen, providing them with an overview of European political history in which the concept of state interest played a key role.
A good deal about the relation between Pufendorf’s learned humanism and his concrete political situation is exemplified in the circumstances of his forced departure from Lund in 1676, owing to the encroachment of renewed war between Denmark and Sweden. For not only was Pufendorf’s arrival in Stockholm cushioned by his appointment as historiographer of the realm, but this position brought with it privileged access to a new and different class of documents. These were the official documents lodged in the Swedish state archives, from which Pufendorf could obtain blow-by-blow accounts of political, military and diplomatic decision-making. The kind of political history that would flow from Pufendorf’s new office and sources is apparent in his history of Sweden’s warrior-king, Gustavus Adolphus, and his daughter, Christina, the History of Gustavus Adolphus and Christina, published in 1686. Despite the enormous documentary detail of his new style of political historiography, Olden-Jørgensen observes that not only did it continue to be informed by Pufendorf’s abiding theoretical concern with state interest, but it was written from the perspective of Swedish political decision-makers, relegating Sweden’s enemies to a marginal position in the narrative, which was itself adjusted and streamlined to this end. Similar remarks apply to Pufendorf’s two remaining political histories, his History of Charles Gustavus – completed in 1686/7, but published posthumously in 1696 – and his Prussian History of Frederick William the Great. The latter was written after Pufendorf had entered the service of Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg in 1688, but not published until 1695, the year after the death of the author. In an illuminating discussion of how Pufendorf balanced his potentially conflicting duties to scholarship and his patron states, Olden-Jørgensen follows Pufendorf’s own lead, treating this as a tension inherent in the office of the court historian, and indeed as driving his work.
Knud Haakonssen’s final chapter, on the contested reception of Pufendorf – something that began with the initial publication of his texts and continues unabated today – provides ample opportunity for reflection on the shifting meaning and significance of the figure of Pufendorf whom readers have encountered in the preceding chapters. ‘History’ holds the key to Haakonssen’s discussion, in two distinct but related senses of the term. In the first sense, the manner in which Pufendorf’s texts have been received, interpreted and contested has varied with the historical contexts in which this has taken place. This is not least because his writings were themselves always interventions in troubled political, religious and intellectual waters, which meant that the light cast back on his work was always bent and refracted by its passage through those waters. Secondly, history in the sense of historiographical writing provided a key means of reception for his work. This was initially in the form of the prefaces and essays on the history of natural law that accompanied the central texts of natural law, including Pufendorf’s, and that attempted to establish the terms of reception by providing an account of founding figures, and lines of descent and deviation. Since the humanist character of Pufendorf’s writings meant that they consisted of erudite engagement with a wide array of ancient and modern auctores, the prefatory histories of natural law fashioned their own priority-lists of key authorities and, in doing so, enacted receptions for particular historical contexts and purposes. This was the case with the attempt to conscript Pufendorf to a Grotian lineage of natural law suited to the ecumenist programme of the Boineburg circle. But it was also true of the attempts by his Protestant scholastic enemies to locate him in a ‘heretical’ Hobbesian lineage, as discussed in Fiammetta Palladini’s account of Pufendorf’s ‘Scandinavian controversies’. Haakonssen observes that such contested receptions were driven not least by the widespread and intensive pedagogical use of natural law as a clearing house and propaedeutic for an array of disciplines – including politics, jurisprudence, philosophy, theology and historiography – whose teaching was driven by the competing religious and political interests of academic institutions and their parent polities and churches. Haakonssen concludes by noting that the further Pufendorf’s works travelled from his own context in the religiously fractured German Empire – which drove his concern to supply a model for political authority capable of governing multi-religious polities – the more his massive works could be broken down into particular disciplinary morsels, able to be picked over by philosophers, jurists and moralists for their own purposes.
4. Conclusion
The chapters that now lie before the reader provide a conspectus of the life and works of a formidable and influential early modern intellectual. Introduced to humanist erudition and writing at the local Grimma grammar school, the village parson’s son ended his life as a famous political historian and adviser to two of northern Europe’s most powerful royal courts. In the interim, the exigencies, opportunities and accidents of his life had allowed him to parlay his erudition into a formidable body of work. This found its centre of gravity in Pufendorf’s radical reconstruction of the discipline of natural law, but encompassed major contributions to German constitutional history, European political history, the histories of the Swedish and Brandenburg crowns, and a lay theology directly engaging the fraught religious and political circumstances of late seventeenth-century Protestant Europe. In these works we encounter a man of great and ceaseless erudition whose insistence on placing his learning at the disposal of the political and religious circumstances in which he found himself, and of the patrons that he found in those circumstances, resulted in works that are by turns profoundly pondered and directly engaged, deeply learned and fiercely polemical, directed at human kind and yet never far removed from the defence of Protestantism and its protective carapace, the princely territorial state. When Leibniz judged The Duty of Man and Citizen to be a work whose lack of philosophical principles and borrowing from other authors suited it only for readers ‘satisfied with a superficial smattering’ of natural law, then, to the extent that it was not motivated by professional jealousy and spite, this judgment arose from blank incomprehension.Footnote 40 For a philosopher who sought knowledge through transcendental reflection on an eternal mind could have little understanding of a humanist who created knowledge through ceaseless sifting of the greatest ancient and modern authorities with a view to fashioning a mind capable of facing up to its historical circumstances. Owing to the dominance of German philosophy in modern humanities faculties, Leibniz’s incomprehension and condescension cast a long shadow over Pufendorf. But the essays collected in this volume make it possible for readers to see that remarkable political humanist stepping vividly into the light.
