Samuel Pufendorf Research Articles

Die Hobbes’sche Gleichheit als Zusammenprall ,nicht existierender Rechte‘ nach der Kritik von Samuel Pufendorf

This contribution aims to analyse Samuel Pufendorf’s critique of the Hobbesian con- cept of equality as the equal exercise of natural rights.In the first section of this article, which addresses the basis of equality, Pufendorf applies his fundamental distinction between obliging and coercing to the Hobbesian foundational principle of equality, namely the right to all things, or ius in omnia. Thus, Pufendorf interprets Hobbes’ ius in omnia not as a right in the true sense, which, in the social context, should always be correlated with duty but as a mere power to coerce that fails to acknowledge the other as a moral subject. This power would ultimately lead, in reality, to a futile clash between ‘non-existent rights’. The second paragraph explores the subjective aspect of equality according to the two authors. For Pufendorf, it is the respect (dignatio) for the other as an equally free and rational being, while for Hobbes, it is the mutual fear among men.

Peter I and the Birth of Russian Historical Science

The article describes the significant influence of Peter the Great on the emergence of Russian historical science. Tsar Peter Alekseevich supported rationalism and the theory of natural law, demanded that his subjects accepted the postulates of Western European theories that could be viewed as advanced at that historical moment, and be guided by them in their activities. Attaching great importance to historical knowledge, Peter I closely followed the development of Western European historical science, ordered the works of European historians to be translated into Russian. In particular, in 1718 the Tsar personally ordered Gabriel Buzhinsky to translate from Latin into Russian the work of the German historian and lawyer Samuel Pufendorf “Introductio ad Historiam Europeam”, and then personally checked the accuracy of the translation. Peter the Great commanded that the artillery Lieutenant-Captain V.N. Tatishchev began to write a work in geography, and then in the history of Russia. In turn, the author of the article shows that the works of S. Pufendorf had a serious impact on the formation of V.N. Tatishchev’s scientific worldview. Comparative analysis of the historical and philosophical works of Pufendorf and Tatishchev allows us to trace the intellectual process set by Peter I: the process of penetration of rationalistic methods of thinking and cognition into the Russian national worldview.

Johann Christian von Boineburg, Samuel Pufendorf, and the foundation myth of modern natural law

ABSTRACT The aim is to contribute to a better understanding of Samuel Pufendorf’s road from his early Elementa jurisprudentiae universalis, published in late 1660 to the eight ‘books’ of De jure naturae et gentium from 1672. In the latter, Pufendorf completed a methodical shift from the more geometrico method to a universal jurisprudence based upon a wide range of humanistic arts, including history. In this connection, Pufendorf gave more credit to Hugo Grotius and his De jure belli ac pacis than in the earlier work. The paper redefines the role that Pufendorf’s contacts with the Chief Minister from Mainz, Johann Christian von Boineburg and his closest collaborators, Hermann Conring and Johann Heinrich Boecler played in Pufendorf’s shift of approach to ‘universal jurisprudence’. Hitherto underexplored correspondence of Boineburg with Boecler permits a reconstruction of the polemic that Boineburg incited and fuelled between Pufendorf and Boecler. Pufendorf’s reflections of the events in the Preface of the first edition of De jure naturae et gentium and later Christian Thomasius’s account in Paulo plenior, historia juris naturalis made the intermezzo into an essential part of the foundation myth of modern natural law.

Religious Otherness and National Identity in Scandinavia, c. 1790–1960: The Construction of Jews, Mormons, and Jesuits as Anti-citizens and Enemies of Society

Religious Otherness and National Identity in Scandinavia, c. 1790–1960: The Construction of Jews, Mormons, and Jesuits as Anti-citizens and Enemies of Society

Esteem and sociality in Pufendorf’s natural law theory

ABSTRACT Samuel Pufendorf’s major work on natural law, De jure nature et gentium, included a long chapter on the power of the civil sovereign to determine the value of citizens. There, Pufendorf identified several forms of esteem (existimatio), according to which human beings are ranked in social life. The article argues that behind Pufendorf’s discussion of this topic was the idea that the way people esteem others and want others to esteem them has profound consequences for maintaining peaceful social life and is therefore morally regulated by the fundamental natural-law duty to maintain sociality. The article explores the key elements of Pufendorf’s multifaceted analyses of esteem, making apparent how they were connected to sociality. The article also analyses Pufendorf’s argument for the duty to esteem other humans as one’s equals by nature, questioning the view that this relied on the idea of human dignity understood as an intrinsic value of human beings. Pufendorf’s argument for this duty was a part of same project as his analyses of existimatio, namely, to define how natural law regulates the way human beings esteem each other, and it relied on his observations concerning the character of human self-esteem.

Castle in Kruszwica. A historical and archaeological overview

This article presents written sources that make it possible to reconstruct the historyand appearance of the castle in Kruszwica, built in the mid-14th century on the initiative of KingCasimir the Great. These are primarily the lustrations of the royal estates and Erik JönssonDahlbergh’s engraving included in Samuel Pufendorf’s work De rebus a Carolo GustavoSueciae Rege gestis. However, basic information about the Crusaders’ defensive foundationis provided by archaeological research, which verifies and supplements previous historicalknowledge. Thus, the results of several archaeological explorations are described, which madeit possible to secure the remains of the fortress, reconstruct its layout and form, as well as itslater fate in the 19th–21st centuries.

Freedom and Capitalism in Early Modern Europe: Mercantilism and the Making of the Modern Economic Mind

Freedom and Capitalism in Early Modern Europe: Mercantilism and the Making of the Modern Economic Mind

The History of Fair Trade: Hugo Grotius, Corporations, and the Spanish Enlightenment

Abstract The early Spanish Enlightenment was shaped by debates over corporations, sovereignty, and the balance of power in Europe. Spanish officials, in this context, turned to the ideas of Hugo Grotius to establish joint-stock companies that could allow the Crown to regain control over its imperial domains and establish perpetual peace in Europe. This article recovers the writings of Félix Fernando de Sotomayor, Duke of Sotomayor (1684–1767), who drew on the works of Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, and Charles Dutot in order to show that the history of these corporations chronicled the contestation and erosion of Spanish power and the diversion of European states from their true interests. Sovereigns, not merchants, argued Sotomayor, could guarantee fair trade and the equitable distribution of wealth. The study of Sotomayor’s views on trade, natural law, and alienation challenges traditional interpretations about the Iberian engagement with Grotius, the rise of capitalist hopes in Southern and Northern Europe, and Spain’s investment in the Enlightenment.

Locke’s Ciceronian Liberalism

Few features of John Locke’s political thought have inspired more controversy than his doctrine of natural law. Although he bases his entire political project on it, Locke never completely elaborates the grounds and contents of the natural law in any of his published works. In this essay, I look to Locke’s unpublished Questions Concerning the Law of Nature. I argue that, read in light of Locke’s published works, the essay reveals the coherence of Locke’s doctrine of natural law. I further argue that this natural law is almost certainly consciously adopted by Locke from Cicero (and Cicero’s modern expositors, such as Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf). If persuasive, this argument helps to solve some of the problems of Lockean natural law, while also uncovering the unappreciated classical roots of Locke’s liberalism.

Pufendorf and Leibniz on duties of esteem in diplomatic relations

The striving for self-worth is recognized as a driving force in international relations; but if self-worth is understood as a function of status in a power hierarchy, this striving often is a source of anxiety and conflict over status. The quasi-international relations within the early modern German Empire have prompted seventeenth-century natural law theorists such as Samuel Pufendorf and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to reflect about this problem. In his De statu imperii Germanici (1667), Pufendorf regards the power differences and dependencies between the Reichsstände to be an expression of the deficits of constitutional structure of the Empire—a structure that, in his view, causes internal division because it leads to distorted practices of esteem between the estates. Against Pufendorf, Leibniz argues De jure suprematus ac legationis (1671) that political actors such as the German princes who are not Electors could fulfill functions under the law of nations such as forming confederations and peace keeping. Incoherently, however, Leibniz excludes less powerful estates such as the Imperial cities and the Hanseatic cities from the ensuing duties of esteem. This shortcoming, in turn, is arguably remedied in Pufendorf’s later considerations concerning duties of esteem in diplomatic relations.

‘No more occasion for Puffendorf nor Hugo Grotius’: the Spanish rights of possession in America and the Darien venture (1698–1701)

ABSTRACT Set within the framework of international intellectual history, the present article focusses on the propaganda campaign undertaken by the Company of Scotland to prove the legality of its settlement in the Darien province. It first shows how a group of Scottish authors appropriated sixteenth-century natural law arguments from Spanish sources to reject the claims based on the Bulls of Donation and conquest, which underpinned Spain’s sovereignty over its American territories. Acting individually and collectively, anonymously and under pseudonyms, pro-Darien propagandists instrumentally quoted and restated the contents of major works from Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolomé de Las Casas. Additionally, the Scots also deployed the theories elaborated by Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf to refute discovery and occupation as further means of acquisition of American lands. In contrast with Spanish expansionism, the Scottish colony eventually grounded its claims on the consent of the indigenous Cuna rulers and on the official treaties recognizing the latter's sovereignty over Darien, emulating the Dutch commercial model of empire and colonial practices.

«Народ» в политической мысли европейского модерна: Гоббс, Спиноза, Пуфендорф

The author considers the evolution of the concept “people” in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Samuel Pufendorf and Benedict Spinoza. The political thought of Europe in the 17th century demonstrates a conscious turn from the medieval scholastic tradition of thinking about people and power. Politics begins to be thought of as a complex of human ac­tions aimed at achieving certain human goals. This, in turn, leads to the rationalisation of politics and, as a consequence, to the rejection of one of the most powerful mystical and theo­logical abstractions of the late Middle Ages — the concept “people” as a kind of mystical body. Protestant science makes a clear choice in favour of interpreting the concept as an “arti­ficial person”. The author emphasizes that the introduction of the concept “natural state” led to changes in the ontological status of people in political theory. The concept “people” becomes “a flickering subject” that appears during the transition from a natural state to a civil one and disappears when the transition goes in the opposite direction. In a civil state, people become an active subject when they perform the function of the legislator. In other cases, people as a political subject transform into a certain multitude, consisting of separate individuals.

Equity, Prudence und Moral Quantity of Action in Samuel Pufendorf’s Legal Theory

The present essay intends to reconstruct the fundamental function of the juridical-formal procedure, carried out by equity in Samuel Pufendorf ’s legal theory, aiming at the adequate application of the positive norm to an exceptional case. To this end, equity conveys the moral contents of the natural law within the positive one, especially if the latter presents gaps or is in contradiction with the former. The essay also examines the characteristics of the equitable judgement, conceived by Pufendorf in the form of the rhetorical syllogism or enthymeme, operating within the moral discipline of prudentia. As such, equity is therefore closely linked to the pufendorfian methodological question if man’s free action is measurable with the exact mathematical criteria or with the most approximate equitable ones. In this methodological context, Pufendorf interprets equity as the criterion for measuring the moral quantity of an action.

Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf on Last Wills and Testaments

Hugo Grotius believed that last wills belonged to the Law of Nature, whereas Samuel Pufendorf argued that testamentary succession was a mere creation of human laws. I argue that Pufendorf’s rejection of the Natural Law origins for wills lacks internal consistency in both his Natural Law system and his proprietary rights theory. Pufendorf even contradicts his own previous claim stating wills are recognised by the Law of Nature as useful to the promotion of social peace. Grotius’s analysis of testaments, on the other hand, brief though it may be, is entirely consistent with his previous arguments: that the Law of Nature can attach itself to human creation; and that a human creation such as testamentary succession belongs to Natural Law when derived from, or when it agrees with, human reason and sociability.

Prigimtinė teisė ir civilizacinė pažanga: politinės teorijos prielaidos Simono Daukanto istoriografijoje

This article aims to identify and reconstruct a few main elements of political theory upon which the works of Simonas Daukantas, the founding father of the national Lithuanian written history, are based. Daukantas’s major works on Lithuanian history were researched while identifying and closely analyzing the passages where Daukantas specifically speaks about natural law and civilizational progress. Daukantas’s history works were considerably influenced by authors of Neostoic natural law theory, such as Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, and Antoine-Yves Goguet. This influence shows in the adopted conceptions of natural needs, natural sociability, and a characterization of the emergence of private property rights in Lithuania with the help of conjectural history methods. Daukantas traces natural law elements in the oldest customs of the people and therefore gives most attention to reconstructing and describing the mores of the ancient Lithuanians. In describing historical evolution, he applied in his works the concepts of bright and dark periods as well as the distinctions of other separate stages of civilizational progress as discussed in Enlightenment historiography and conjectural history in particular.

The Political Ideal of Toleration in the Work of Pufendorf, Locke and Rawls

This paper examines the political ideal of toleration in the work of Samuel Pufendorf, John Locke and John Rawls. The paper contrasts a non-liberal conception of toleration with a liberal conception of toleration. The paper was originally given as a lecture and provides an introduction to thinking about the political ideal of toleration.

Pufendorf's Secular Ethics

This paper provides a preliminary assessment the role of law and power in Samuel Pufendorf’s secular ethics. Pufendorf designed his ethics for “this life”, and grounded morality within a geometric network of obligations that connected the sovereign to the actors of the sovereign’s office. One of the most interesting aspects of Pufendorf’s ethics is how he links freedom and power. We are totally free in the state of nature, yet powerless. We have power as citizens, but limited freedom. Comparison is made with the political ethics of John Rawls.

The invention of human nature: the intention and reception of Pufendorf’s entia moralia doctrine

ABSTRACTIn treating human nature as a ‘moral entity’, imposed by God for reasons into which man could have no direct insight, Samuel Pufendorf reconfigured the architecture of natural law thought in a fundamental way. For this meant that rather than deducing norms from a nature in which they had been embedded by God and could be discerned by self-reflective reason, man had to derive them by observing the requirements of the exigent condition in which he happened to find himself; and it further meant that such observation would be gathered via erudite citation of humanist authorities, rather than from philosophical reflection or introspection. As a result of this reconstruction, Pufendorfian natural law was opened to the normative structure of historically existing juridical-constitutional orders, for which it supplied both a propaedeutic and an abstract rationale. At the same time, however, theological and philosophical forms of natural law, based on normative moral anthropologies, continued unabated, this giving rise to a partitioning of the field into an introspective philosophy of law, and an observational legal humanism.

Źródła szwedzkie do kampanii feldmarszałka Ottona Gustava Stenbocka w Prusach Książęcych i do bitwy pod Filipowem (22 X 1656 r.)

The diary of Gustav Otto Stenbock from the Royal Prussia campaign in autumn 1656 and the account of the battle of Filipów (22.10.1656) are in the Riksarkivet archive in Stockholm. They have not yet been used in the study of the Polish-Swedish War of 1655–1660. In many places, correlating with the relevant fragment of the work of Samuel Pufendorf on the wars of Charles X Gustav, they introduce new details: the chronology of the initial phase of the Stenbock campaign and the composition of the division led by the Lithuanian field marshal Wincenty Gosiewski. In the latter case, it is not certain whether the list concerns the battle of Prostki (8.10.1656) or Filipów. The bases of the edition were copies from the Swedish Microfilms collection at the Central Archives of Historical Records in Warsaw.

Political Atheism and Early Modern Natural Law

This essay examines how natural law ideas of early modern Protestant and Catholic thinkers unwittingly conspired to undergird the conceptual possibility of political atheism. Political atheism refers to the idea that there could be a domain of action, the temporal, which could be effectively governed without need for recourse to spiritual instruments or authority. Pierre Bayle shocked his contemporaries in 1682 when he argued for the possibility of a well ordered society of atheists. The essay looks at the foundations of this kind of argument in the epicurean anthropology of Protestant jurisconsults, Samuel Pufendorf and Christian Thomasius, and in the concept of “indirect papal power” developed by Catholic canon lawyer Robert Bellarmine. The essay takes as its case study the papal interdict issued to Republican Venice in 1606-1607.