Samuel von Pufendorf

German legal scholar and philosopher

• Born: January 8, 1632
• Birthplace: Dorfchemnitz, Saxony (now in Germany)
• Died: October 26, 1694
• Place of death: Berlin, Prussia (now in Germany)

Pufendorf’s teachings on jurisprudence, theology, and ethics made possible significant advances in the development of natural law theories in the Western world of the early modern age.

Early Life

The family background of Samuel von Pufendorf (PEW-fehn-dohrf) has been described as extending over four generations of Lutheran clergy, who had practiced that calling for about a century. Relatively little has been recorded, however, about Samuel’s father, except that he was a pastor of relatively modest means. When Samuel was born, as the third of four children, the family resided in Dorfchemnitz, a village in Saxony. During the next year, they moved to Flöha, about five miles from Chemnitz.

Because of the promise and academic aptitude Samuel and his elder brother Esaias had shown, they received financial support from a wealthy nobleman, which enabled them to attend the well-known Prince’s School in Grimma. The education that was received there consisted of lessons in grammar, rhetoric, logic, Bible reading, and Lutheran dogma; although he later complained of excessive rigidity and dullness among his teachers, Pufendorf maintained with some satisfaction that he availed himself of the ample free time that was allowed students to make himself familiar with works of classical Greek and Latin writers.

After attending this secondary school between 1645 and 1650, he was enrolled at the University of Leipzig; though his father had hoped and expected that his son’s education there would prepare him for the ministry, Pufendorf, again following the example of his brother, turned away from theology, which both of them regarded as a discipline that was presented in an overly conservative manner. Among the subjects that did interest him were history, jurisprudence, philology, and philosophy; this eclectic bent, bordering sometimes on indiscriminate erudition, may have foreshadowed traits of this sort in his later writings.

In 1656, Pufendorf went on to the University of Jena, where in two years he earned the degree of magister. He read works on mathematics and studied modern philosophy; he devoted special attention to the writings of Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes . Moreover, with the encouragement of Erhard Weigel, a professor of mathematics who was to become known as one of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s early mentors, Pufendorf became impressed with the notion that ethical principles could be adduced with the rigor of mathematical logic. Although schematic conceptions of that sort did not gain Pufendorf’s unwavering adherence, a confluence of ideas evidently was taking form by which the conception of natural law guided by natural reason had become foremost.

Shortly after he left Jena, Pufendorf, with the assistance of his brother Esaias, obtained a position as tutor to the family of Peter Julius Coyet, the Swedish minister in Copenhagen. Yet when Sweden, which previously had been at war with Denmark, broke off peace negotiations to reopen hostilities, Danish authorities put the minister’s staff and attendants under arrest. During a period of eight months when Pufendorf was imprisoned, he had the opportunity to compose his first work on the principles of law. In 1659, he left for the Netherlands, where Coyet had resumed his diplomatic work in The Hague, and in 1660 Pufendorf’s Elementorum jurisprudentiae universalis (English translation, 1929) was published. At the University of Leiden, he was able to pursue further studies in classical philology. He also obtained a recommendation from Pieter de Groot, a son of Grotius, who was an agent in the Netherlands for Karl Ludwig, the elector of the Palatinate. Pufendorf had arranged to have his book dedicated to the elector, and in 1661 he was offered a position, the first of its kind in Germany, in philology and international law at the University of Heidelberg.

Life’s Work

Pufendorf’s appointment was to the faculty of philosophy, rather than law, and his disenchantment with the place he actually received may have been reflected in a trenchant and polemical, but also bold and insightful, study of the law and constitution of the Holy Roman Empire. His De statu imperii Germanici (1667; The Present State of Germany , 1690), published abroad under a pseudonym, was banned by the imperial censor. In this work, Pufendorf attacked pretense and empty formality in the imperial constitution. In a famous passage, he contended that the empire, being neither a monarchy nor a democracy nor yet an aristocracy, resembled a monstrosity of irregular proportions; sovereignty on behalf of the state had been compromised, according to Pufendorf, by conflicting forms of authority exercised by its constituent rulers within the empire.

The outcry that attended the circulation of this work, taken with Pufendorf’s continuing dissatisfaction with his academic lot, left him open to offers from other patrons of learning. Although he had married Katharina Elisabeth von Palthen, a wealthy widow, in 1665, he felt sufficiently uneasy about his position in Germany that he accepted another appointment, advanced on behalf of King Charles XI of Sweden, to take up a full professorship at the University of Lund. Some of Pufendorf’s later publications dealt once more with problems of the German constitution but conceded in effect that easy resolutions were not at hand.

More theoretical, and of greater importance for Pufendorf’s subsequent reputation, was the major work De jure naturae et gentium (1672; Of the Law of Nature and Nations , 1703), of which De officio hominis et civis juxta legem naturalem (1673; The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature , 1691) provided a condensed version for the general reading public. Great controversy arose over his effort to treat natural law at some distance from theological doctrines. According to Pufendorf, although Christianity could be regarded as ordained by the law of God, citizenship was ordered by the law of the state. Although natural law was derived from both rational and religious principles, it imposed obligations of a civic and moral sort, which could not be subsumed with respect to church or state. Pufendorf maintained that every individual, by virtue of intrinsic human dignity, had a right to freedom and equality; although he regarded humans as social beings, he rejected Aristotle’s contention that slavery, in distinction to contractual agreements of master and servant, could be upheld on any rational basis.

The impact of Hobbes’s thought could be found in many places, for, like Hobbes, Pufendorf took a presumed state of nature as a starting point in his arguments on moral and political relationships; he opposed the notion that by disposition people were hostile to one another, though he seemed to grant that individual self-interest was the wellspring of action in society. He also took issue with the English writer’s conception of authority, even as he accorded similar notions an important place in his own works.

Whereas early in his career Pufendorf had endeavored to defend Grotius’s views, his interpretation of Hobbes had prompted him as well to counterpose his own positions with respect to Grotius’s ideas. Pufendorf had come to oppose any notions of the transfer of natural rights, and instead he contended that self-defense and the preservation of property could be asserted in ways that were not provided for in Grotius’s thought. On the international level, where Grotius had maintained that natural law of a special sort was binding upon states, Pufendorf was likely to posit rights and interests of separate sovereigns as principles affecting international relations.

In its outlines, Pufendorf’s system of natural law was a vast and, on some counts, imperfectly defined edifice that encompassed ethics, government, jurisprudence, government, and social thought. Whereas some critics have maintained that the very scope of this enterprise may have blunted Pufendorf’s purposes, more specific objections have centered on ways by which he sought the reconciliation of opposing postulates by adopting a middle course, which left certain issues murky or incompletely resolved. He upheld the principle of sovereignty as a source of government and argued that self-sufficiency and self-determination were necessary for the existence of any state. His notion of authority led to a justification of actions undertaken for reasons of state; he did not, however, defend the unbridled exercise of power for its own sake, nor did he maintain that encroachments upon the rights of individuals should be permitted at will. Much of the argument he advanced on this front had to do as well with the delimitation of authority between church and state.

In some of his later writings, he set forth positions concerning the authority of the state in civil affairs and the power of the Church over ecclesiastical matters, in ways by which he maintained that freedom of conscience could be observed with respect to individuals. In his own day, Pufendorf was roundly denounced by many theologians for his restrictive views on the province of the Church; in many respects, however, his thought was aimed at the promotion of toleration; indeed, his most notable work on theology also justified the elector of Brandenburg’s acceptance of Huguenot refugees after France had revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685.

After Danish forces, during another war with Sweden, had captured Lund, Pufendorf went to Stockholm. In 1677, he became royal historiographer, with the rank of secretary of state; he was allowed access to government archives. He became concerned particularly with relatively recent historical problems, notably those involving the position of Sweden during and after the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). Although his voluminous writings in this area have enjoyed relatively little vogue subsequently, his methods—which often consisted in the paraphrasing of, or indeed wholesale quotation from, original documents—occasionally have been cited as suggesting an approach that would allow firsthand materials to elucidate the unfolding of great events. It would appear, however, that he made little effort to allow for any elements of bias that may have arisen in relying upon sources from one side, and his historical writing sometimes exhibited a pronounced moderation in dealing with delicate political matters affecting Sweden or Prussia.

The portraits of Pufendorf that exist show a dignified man of a sober and pensive bearing; to artists, he showed a steady and deliberate gaze. He had a long straight nose and a firm mouth above a relatively small chin; in some representations, he was depicted with somewhat rounded features and thick, fleshy cheeks. Toward the end of his career, Pufendorf was honored by two courts. In 1688, he left Sweden to become historiographer for the elector of Brandenburg, and while he was in Berlin he produced several works, including studies of Hohenzollern rulers. In the last year of his life, Pufendorf received a baronetcy from the Prussian ruler, thus adding the “von” to his name, and, during a visit to Stockholm, he was similarly ennobled by the Swedish crown. The state of his health had been difficult for some time, and, upon his return to Berlin, he died from an embolism, on October 26, 1694. A work that was published posthumously the following year developed further his ideas on ecclesiastical law and put forward a proposal for Protestant unity.

Significance

It was the peculiar fate of Pufendorf’s thought to be widely discussed and probably more often praised than condemned, for about a century after his death; subsequently, his works were relegated to an obscurity into which few, save scholars and intellectual historians, have ventured. In part this result came about because doctrines of secular law became more widely accepted, while, with the development of modern jurisprudence, natural law theories increasingly were regarded as artifacts of an earlier age.

In any event, while it lasted, interest in Pufendorf’s writings involved some public men of note. Although Leibniz disparaged him as “a poor jurist and a worse philosopher,” John Locke preferred Pufendorf’s works to those of Grotius; important theorists who continued in the natural law tradition included Christian Thomasius and Christian von Wolff. Numerous editions of Pufendorf’s works and translations into several languages appeared during the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In one form or another, his influence was cited in works of Sir William Blackstone and of Montesquieu. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot found Pufendorf’s writings admirably suited for instruction and education. At opposite ends of the Western world, Peter the Great of Russia commissioned a translation of one of his famous works, and Pufendorf’s writings evidently were consulted in the composition of Catherine the Great’s legislative instruction; in the American colonies, clergyman and publicist John Wise referred liberally to the German jurist, and other American leaders paid homage to Pufendorf’s thought.

All the while, however, other thinkers, by moving beyond those points where Pufendorf had been most cogent, in effect consigned him to a lesser status over the long term; perhaps because his thought was neither entirely consistent nor strictly innovative, his reputation waned to the point that he has been remembered partly because of the influence he exercised rather than because of the various merits of his original writings.

Bibliography

Gierke, Otto. Natural Law and the Theory of Society, 1500 to 1800. 2 vols. Translated by Ernest Barker. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1934. This topical study of major themes and concepts deals with Pufendorf’s thought, on the whole rather favorably, and suggests comparisons with the ideas of other theorists.

Gross, Hanns. Empire and Sovereignty: A History of the Public Law Literature in the Holy Roman Empire, 1599-1804. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. The author, in providing a chronological survey of pertinent works, discusses Pufendorf’s writings on the imperial constitution in a balanced fashion, while also dealing with the broader context of such publications.

Haakonssen, Knud, ed. Grotius, Pufendorf, and Modern Natural Law. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1999. Includes four essays about various aspects of Pufendorf’s philosophy, including his ideas on the modern state and human rights, and an analysis of his place in the history of ethics.

Hunter, Ian. Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Hunter describes the rivalry between civil philosophers, such as Pufendorf, and university metaphysicians, such as Leibniz and Kant, over questions of politics and religion. He maintains that civil philosophers have not received the recognition they deserve, and he aims to reinstate this philosophical tradition.

Krieger, Leonard. The Politics of Discretion: Pufendorf and the Acceptance of Natural Law. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. This study discusses Pufendorf’s life and his political and moral thought, legal doctrines, and writings on history and theology. The author critiques the philosophical merits of Pufendorf’s teachings, and he concludes that rather little may be found in the way of coherence or logical rigor.

Nutkiewicz, Michael. “Samuel Pufendorf: Obligation as the Basis of the State.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 21 (1983): 15-30. This study maintains that, by eschewing mechanistic analogies, Pufendorf was able to arrive at ethical theories, utilizing concepts that differed from those employed by Hobbes, Spinoza, and other contemporaries.

Phillipson, Coleman. “Samuel Pufendorf.” In Great Jurists of the World, edited by John Macdonell and Edward Manson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1914. This sympathetic exposition of Pufendorf’s ideas, though partly cast in the context of later controversies over legal positivism, points out how theories of natural law were significant for seventeenth century thought and were of great influence even in areas where later thinkers turned away from such notions.

Tuck, Richard. Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. In this survey, which considers developments since late medieval times, Pufendorf is discussed in the light of works in which, at various turns, he upheld but subsequently repudiated the ideas of Grotius.