Samuel, baron von Pufendorf

Samuel, baron von Pufendorf (born January 8, 1632, Dorfchemnitz, near Thalheim, Saxony [now in Germany]—died October 13, 1694, Berlin) was a German jurist and historian, best known for his defense of the idea of natural law. He was created a baron in the last year of his life.

Early life and works

Pufendorf’s father was a Lutheran pastor, and, though the family was poor, financial help from a rich nobleman enabled his father to send both Samuel and his older brother Esaias to a prestigious school in Grimma, where Samuel acquired a sound classical education. He became a student of theology at the University of Leipzig, then a stronghold of Lutheran orthodoxy, but soon turned his attention to jurisprudence, philology, philosophy, and history. In 1656 he went to Jena, where he was introduced to the dualistic system of the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes and also read the works of the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius and the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

In 1658 Pufendorf was employed as a tutor in the home of the Swedish ambassador in Copenhagen. When war broke out between Sweden and Denmark, he was imprisoned along with the rest of the ambassador’s retinue. During eight months of confinement, he occupied himself by elaborating his first work on natural law, Two Books of the Elements of Universal Jurisprudence (1660), in which he further developed the ideas of Grotius and Hobbes. The elector palatine Karl Ludwig, to whom the work was dedicated, created a chair of natural law for Pufendorf in the arts faculty at the University of Heidelberg—the first of its kind in Germany. From 1661 to 1668 Pufendorf taught at Heidelberg, where he wrote The Present State of Germany (1667). Written under the pseudonym Severnius de Monzabano Veronensis, the work was a bitter attack on the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire and the house of Habsburg. Based on his wide reading in constitutional law and history, the book created an immediate sensation throughout Europe and was banned by the imperial censor, a prohibition that was likely a decisive factor in its translation into many languages and its publication abroad.

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Career in Sweden

Pufendorf left Heidelberg in 1668 to accept the chair of natural law at the new University of Lund in Sweden, where he spent 20 fruitful years. In 1672 he published his great work, Of the Law of Nature and Nations. The following year he published an excerpt from it, titled The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature, in which Pufendorf departed from the traditional approach of the medieval theologians to natural law and based it on man’s existence as a social being (socialitas). He argued that every individual has a right to equality and freedom on the basis of human dignity and insisted—despite the contrary teaching of Aristotle (384–322 bc)—that there is no such creature as a natural slave, positing that master-servant relationships exist only on the basis of an agreement. Pufendorf’s theories of civil, penal, and constitutional law also derived from the same principle of socialitas.

His great influence was not won without a struggle. His views were subjected to numerous attacks by conservative Protestant theologians in Sweden and Germany, and the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz even dismissed him as “a man not a lawyer and scarcely a philosopher at all.” The Swedish government, however, protected him, and, in pamphlets signed Eris Scandica (1686), he defended his beliefs very effectively.

In 1677, after the Danish occupation of Lund, Pufendorf became the royal historiographer in Stockholm, where he devoted much of his time to writing the history of Sweden from Gustav II Adolf (1594–1632) to Charles X Gustav (1622–60). In 1687 he published Of the Nature and Qualification of Religion in Reference to Civil Society, which set forth the civil superiority of the state over the church but also defended the church’s power in ecclesiastical matters as well as the freedom of conscience of the individual. His approach became the basis of the collegial, or council, system of church government that was further developed in the 18th century to become the basis of church and state relations in Germany. The book also contained a justification of the idea of tolerance in general and in particular of the elector of Brandenburg, who had offered asylum to the Huguenots when they were driven out of France in 1685.

In 1688 Pufendorf went to Berlin to serve as historiographer to the elector of Brandenburg. He was created a baron in 1694 and died later that year. A posthumous work, Jus Feciale Sive de Consensu et Dissensu Protestantium (“Law of Diplomacy, or Agreement and Disagreement of Protestants”), was published in 1695 and expounded more of his ideas on ecclesiastical law, arguing in favour of the formation of a united Protestant church from the Reformed and Lutheran churches.

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A great number of editions of his works were published during the 18th century. The English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) and the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) recommended them as reading for young people, and the emperor Joseph II (1741–90) of Austria was instructed in The Whole Duty as a boy. One of Pufendorf’s disciples was John Wise (1652–1725), an American clergyman and pamphleteer who greatly influenced American ecclesiastical law and the struggle for civil and religious liberty in the colonies.