LEIBNIZ' CRITIQUE OF PUFENDORF'S NATURAL LAW THEORY

In many ways the relationship of Leibniz and Pufendorf mirrored that of Locke and Hobbes: they (apparently) never met, they did not exchange a correspondence of real intellectual substance, and an uneasy, sniping, hostility seems to have characterised the opinion of the younger man towards his senior. Certainly, the careers of Leibniz and Pufendorf offer interesting parallels. Both were encouraged in the 1660s by their common patron, Baron Boineburg, to produce a systematic account of ‘universal jurisprudence’; both wrote works seeking remedies for the political decay of the Holy Roman empire; both retained a life-long interest in the study of natural law as the best means of achieving a resolution within their own philosophies of the respective claims of God and man. Above all, many of their doctrines were derived from a close study of the work of earlier philosophers, and the divergence in their approaches can be traced back to the different lessons they extracted from that exercise. Whereas Pufendorf found Stoic moral theory very helpful in providing an answer to Hobbes, Leibniz in essence believed that Platonism could perform the same function in respect of the same antagonist.

Leibniz' philosophical temperament stabilised early on.