Pufendorf: On the Duty of Man and Citizen according to Natural Law

Overview

As the preceding Chronology indicates, Pufendorf's writings fall into three groups. The first is his attempt to construct a comprehensive political and moral philosophy appropriate to the conditions of modem Europe and based on a set of universal principles or natural laws. He began this project at the University of Jena and worked it out from 1658 to 1677 in the three texts on natural law (EFU, DFN, DOH), the analysis of the German imperial constitution (DSI), and the three collections of clarifications and replies to his critics (DAS, SC, ES). This enterprise is surveyed in the following four sections of the Introduction.

When Pufendorf moved from the University of Lund to Stockhohn in 1677 as political adviser to the Swedish king Charles XI, he set aside the juristic analysis of politics in terms of universal law and obligation and turned to the major competing approach to the understanding of politics in the seventeenth Century. This method consists in analysing the relations within and among contemporary European states by means of comparative and historical analyses of their interests and relative powers with a view to predictions and recommendations to State builders. From the Reason of state (1598) by Giovanni Botero (1540-1617) and the early Spanish and French raison d'état writers, this form of analysis was rapidly developed into pan- European sciences of comparative politics and international relations. The object domain of these sciences is the modern System of independent states locked into a military and commercial rivalry which emerged after the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) and the Peace of Westphalia (1648). Pufendorf's contributions include the earlier history of Philip of Macedon (DRGP), the political history of the Catholic Church (HUP), the contemporary political histories he wrote for Charles XI (CRS, DRC) and, after 1688, for Frederick William I and Frederick III of Prussia (DRF, DRGF), and especially his monumental introduction to the history of the principal states of Europe (EZDH). The EZDH with its rigorous concepts of State interest and relative powers and its comprehensive design, was republished throughout the eighteenth Century. The editors of the French éditions added more chapters, making it a prototype of Enlightenment encyclopaedias of comparative politics.