Samuel von Pufendorf

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23801883.2018.1492422

Istvan Hont’s classic work on the theoretical links between the seventeenth-century natural jurists Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf and the eighteenth-century Scottish political economists remains a popular trope among intellectual and economic historians of various stamps. Despite this, a common criticism levelled at Hont remains his relative lack of engagement with the relationship between religion and economics in the early modern period. This paper challenges this aspect of Hont’s narrative by drawing attention to an alternative, albeit complementary, assessment of the natural jurisprudential heritage of eighteenth-century British political economy. Specifically, the article attempts to map on to Hont’s thesis the Christian Stoic interpretation of Grotius and Pufendorf which has gained greater currency in recent years. In doing so, the paper argues that Grotius and Pufendorf’s contributions to the ‘unsocial sociability’ debate do not necessarily lead directly to the Scottish school of political economists, as is commonly assumed. Instead, it contends that a reconsideration of Grotius and Pufendorf as neo-Stoic theorists, particularly via scrutiny of their respective adaptations of the traditional Stoic theory of oikeiosis, steers us towards the heart of the early English ‘clerical’ Enlightenment.

This article explores the account of international hospitality found in the natural law tradition from Vitoria to Kant. Rather than limit itself to intellectual history, the focus here is on a more enduring theme: the double-bind of hospitality which the natural lawyers encountered in seeking to find a place for the welcome of the foreigner in the ‘law of nations’. Although these thinkers agreed on a natural right of communication, this proved destabilising, even destructive, of the property claims by which hosts establish their domain as properly theirs in the first place. All struggled with this double-bind, though this took different forms, from the concern that the law of hospitality might thereby justify colonial appropriation to fears for how it could threaten sovereignty. Two thinkers arguably find a way out of the double-bind of right of communication-right of property in hospitality, but
sacrifice the law of hospitality in the process: Pufendorf, subordinating communication to property, turns hospitality into charity and thereby effectively denies it status as a law of
nature; Kant, putting communication first, makes hospitality a matter of right, not philanthropy, but also sees it as instrumental to the development of a global civil condition,
where it would be redundant.

This is an uncorrected, pre-proof version. Please do not cite. Final version published in Intellectual History Review.

This article examines the controversy surrounding Andreas Hojer, the future professor of natural law, and his youthful work on the non-prohibition of incestuous marriages by divine law that took place in 1719–1720 in Copenhagen. The article discusses manuscript sources from the theological faculty and central government to show how the controversy concerned not just Hojer's allegedly dangerous arguments but also embodied a heated debate about the liberty to discuss such matters in print. The controversy moreover reveals the significant presence of followers of Christian Thomasius in influential positions in Denmark in the decades around 1700. These Thomasians combined natural law with a strong criticism of the authority of orthodox theologians and, arguably the earliest and most radical, arguments for a wide-ranging liberty of thought, libertas philosophandi, in early modern Denmark. This was in turn met by proponents of a more conservative natural law supporting the theological authorities. The article concludes by discussing how Hojer and the controversy surrounding him illustrate the wider significance of Thomasian natural law for the intellectual culture, for freedom of thought, and for religious and legal reform in early eighteenth-century Denmark.

There is an important but underappreciated ambiguity in Hobbes' concept of personhood. In one sense, persons are representatives or actors. In the other sense, persons are representees or characters. An estate agent is a person in the first sense; her client is a person in the second. This ambiguity is crucial for understanding Hobbes’ claim that the state is a person. Most scholars follow the first sense of ‘person’, which suggests that the state is a kind of actor—in modern terms, a ‘corporate agent’. I argue that Hobbes’ state is a person only in the second sense: a character rather than an actor. If there are any primitive corporate agents in Hobbes' political thought, they are assemblies, not states or corporations. Contemporary political theorists and philosophers tend to miss what is unique and valuable about Hobbes’ idea of state personality because they project the idea of corporate agency onto it.

Immanuel Kant and Samuel Pufendorf were both exercised by the relationship between politics, morality and lawful authority; a relationship that goes to the heart of the sovereign state's existence and legitimacy. However, while Kant defended the authority of the moral law, believing morality provides higher authoritative norms than the sovereign state, Pufendorf defends the political morality of authority, believing the sovereign state should submit to no higher moral norms. The rivalry between these two positions is reprised in current debate between cosmopolitanism and statism over humanitarian intervention. Arguing against statism, this article defends a Habermasian-style critical international theory which affords a 'cosmopolitanism without imperialism'. 4 Helen Thompson notes this unfortunate association in a most thoughtful and non-dogmatic defence of statism, 'The Case for External Sovereignty'

In Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, the narrator finds himself
involved in a moral relation with the title character whose sense he
finds difficult to articulate. I argue that we can make sense of this
relation, up to a certain point, in terms of the influential account
of obligation that Stephen Darwall advances in The Second-Person
Standpoint. But I also argue that there is a dimension of moral
sense in the relation that is not captured by Darwall’s account, or
indeed by any of the accounts of obligation that have been most
prominent in the history of western philosophy from the early
modern period up to the present. More specifically, I argue that
what is brought out in the relation between Bartleby and the
narrator is the separation of the experience of moral necessitation
from the rule that would give its content. I attempt to show that
this obligation without rule is a genuine moral phenomenon and
that we can begin to understand it in terms of the ideas of love,
singularity, and potentiality as these are developed in the work of
Giorgio Agamben.

Samuel Pufendorf is known for his normative natural law philosophy, and particularly for his theory of sociability. This article concentrates on a topic that has received very little attention - his theory of the motivating character of passions in social life. It will demonstrate that individually and politically governed passions play a central role in Pufendorf's description of the structure of human societies. I argue that for Pufendorf the norms of sociability are effective in social life because social interaction, guided by political governance, enables people to moderate their antisocial passions and habituate themselves to sociable passions.

This book centres on Samuel Pufendorf’s (1632–1694) moral and political philosophy, a subject of recently renewed interest among intellectual historians, philosophers and legal scholars in the English-speaking world. Pufendorf’s significance in conceptualizing sociability in a way that ties moral philosophy, the theory of the state, political economy, and moral psychology together has already been acknowledged, but this book is the first systematic investigation of the moral psychological underpinnings of Pufendorf’s theory of sociability in their own right.

Readers will discover how Pufendorf’s psychological and social explanation of sociability plays a crucial role in his natural law theory. By drawing attention to Pufendorf’s scattered remarks and observations on human psychology, a new interpretation of the importance of moral psychology is presented. The author maintains that Pufendorf’s reflection on the psychological and physical capacities of human nature also matters for his description of how people adopt sociability as their moral standard in practice. We see how, since Pufendorf’s interest in human nature is mainly political, moral psychological formulations are important for Pufendorf’s theorizing of social and political order.

This work is particularly useful for scholars investigating the multifaceted role of passions and emotions in the history of moral and political philosophy. It also affords a better understanding of what later philosophers, such as Smith, Hume or Rousseau, might have find appealing in Pufendorf’s writings. As such, this book will also interest researchers of the Enlightenment, natural law and early modern philosophy.

Common possession of the earth was a prominent idea in seventeenth century modern philosophy. In this paper I will argue that Kant not only provides a secularized version of common possession of the earth but also radically departs from the conception of his natural law theory predecessors. I argue that Kant’s account of cosmopolitan right seeks to address the same problem as Grotius’ right of necessity, namely the implausibility of assuming inflexible acquired rights when this would go against the rationale for introducing these rights. However, while Grotius intended to excuse violations of private property in cases of necessity, Kant restricts his discussion to the right of host peoples to reject entrants in their territory. I show that in Kant’s account, denying life-saving occupation of space to another being in principle just as entitled as anyone else to any place of the earth would be to contradict the very justification for the territorial rights of states. This is because the permission to control territory and the right of the involuntary visitor to be admitted are based on the same legal foundation or Rechtsgrund, namely, the original community of the earth.

Up until now, political philosophy has explained the acquisition of natural resources, in one way or another, through the terms of human settlement. An agent acquires natural resources by moving into the geographic area that contains these resources. Even how we make claims to the ocean floor depends on settlement — claimants must be adjacent to settled land.  This essay extends original acquisition theories so that they can respond to cases that do not presuppose any conditions of human settlement.  I suggest that resource rights in the deep sea may be created, alternatively, through acts of compromise. Compromise can alleviate conflict, allowing for claimants to move beyond stalemate to acquire goods.  It also allows for a large degree of flexibility in the specification of rights and thereby can explain nontraditional rights over areas of migration.  The tricky part of a theory that grants rights through agreement is explaining why external parties, those not part of the agreement, have a duty to respect those rights.  A compromise under certain conditions, I argue, places all persons under a duty to respect the rights created by the compromise.  Thus, when two parties compromise, they may acquire goods from the commons —creating a duty for all others to respect the parties’ rights over these goods.  Importantly, rights created through compromise are constrained by a set of concerns for those excluded.

This article examines theories of ocean rights based on the works of Hugo Grotius and Samuel von Pufendorf. Grotius's object-centred view uses features of the natural world to justify claims to external objects. I show that Grotius's view is inadequate, because it relies on an outdated claim that oceanic resources are sufficiently abundant for anybody to use. Further , adaptations of his view are wanting, because they either rely on arbitrary distinctions or disregard the values of cultural minorities. Pufendorf's relational view constructs rights through the exercise of human will. The relational view is a viable alternative to the object-centred view, because it both delimits territorial claims over the ocean to a 'modest' size and also respects cultural variability. A major aim of this article is to present Pufendorf's theory of territorial rights extended over oceans and to demonstrate how it is useful for assessing contemporary disputes. In the final sections, I apply the relational view to Canadian claims to the Northwest Passage, and I also sketch implications for assessing expanding claims to the seabed.

The paper explores theories of moral obligation from those of late scholastics such as Francisco Suarez and Gabriel Vasquez to those of Samuel Pufendorf and John Locke.  The theories of Pufendorf and Locke are contrasted.  Although these two theories appear similar, there is a profound difference between them.  In Pufendorf as in a scholastic such as Suarez, practical reason is seen as involving two distinct kinds of justificatory force or modes of justificatory support, recommendation and demand; and moral obligation is identified, not as a reason-giving property of actions, but as one of these justificatory forces, the force of demand, a force that directly binds the will.  Whereas in Locke there is only one justificatory force, that of recommendation; and moral obligation is no more than a reason-giving property, the property of being commanded by a punitive God, among the many that generate this force.  In Locke as in much subsequent English-language philosophy, moral obligation ceases to be a justificatory force that directly binds the will, and comes to be no more than a reason-giving property of the voluntary actions that the will causes and motivates.  The paper expresses doubts about whether this development has been a genuine conceptual advance, and explores the problems it raises.

While histories of human rights have proliferated in recent decades, little attention has been given to the history of thinking about duties to protect these rights beyond sovereign borders. We have a good understanding of the history of duties of sovereign states to ensure the safety and well-being of their own citizens and of the right of other states to forcefully intervene when these duties are violated. But the story of the development of thinking about duties to assist and protect the vulnerable beyond borders remains to be told. This article defends the importance of excavating and examining past thinking about these duties. It then sketches key aspects of Western natural law thinking about such duties, from Francisco de Vitoria through to Immanuel Kant, claiming that such study holds the promise of exposing from where ideas that prevail in international law and politics have come and retrieving alternative ideas that have been long forgotten but that may reward renewed consideration. It concludes by briefly outlining how three such retrieved ideas might be of particular use for those seeking to push international law and politics in a more just direction today.

Given the conceptual gap in the global justice debate today (where most
of the talk is about the duties of the rich, but little is said about what the poor may do for themselves), in this article I reintroduce the idea of a right of necessity. I first delineate a normative framework for such a right, inspired by these historical accounts. I then offer a contemporary case where the exercise of the right of necessity would be morally legitimate according to that framework – even though illegal and probably condemned by the standard moral norms. The case is that of a small group of
Paraguayan campesinos (small farmers) suffering from the effects of a severe drought. In the third part, I introduce the concept of noncivil disobedience: I call an act of noncivil disobedience a conscientious, public, illegal and forcible act whose performance, while not necessarily intended directly as a means to bring about social and/or political change, may help to trigger these changes indirectly. In the fourth part, I suggest that certain instances where the right of necessity is overtly exercised – as in the case of the famine-struck Paraguayan campesinos – may also be interpreted in terms of noncivil disobedience, insofar as they serve a double function: as a means of satisfying immediate need, and as a marker of discontent in a society where the equal rights of individuals are a nominal ideal which remains unfulfilled in practice. I then address two objections that may be raised against resurrecting the idea of a right of necessity and identifying it in certain instances with noncivil disobedience. I conclude by suggesting that, at the point of convergence between the two, a basic right like the right of necessity recovers its value as an active, (rather than passive) entitlement of its holders, while the use of force enters the picture as a legitimate means that – at least under certain circumstances – may be resorted to within the limits of civil society.

This paper revisits the concept of autonomy and tries to elucidate the fundamental insight that freedom and law cannot be understood through their opposition, but rather have to be conceived of as conditions of one another. The paper investigates the paradig-matic Kantian formulation of this insight and discusses the diagnosis that the Kantian idea might give rise to a paradox in which autonomy reverts to arbitrariness or heteronomy. The paper argues that the fatal version of the paradox can be defused if we avoid the legalistic model of autonomy and rather turn to the model of participation in a practice. This leads to a dialectical understanding of the idea of autonomy that preserves the insight that freedom and law are mutually conditioning and simultaneously reveals that they remain in irresolvable tension with one another.

Differences between the 17th century ‘new moral science’ and Scholastic Natural Law Theory derived primarily from the sceptical challenge the former had to face. Pufendorf ‘s project of a 'scientia practica universalis' was the paramount expression of an anti-sceptical moral science. A need to counterbalance undesirable implications of extreme voluntarism may account for much of 17th and 18th centuries developments in ethics and politics. Scottish natural jurisprudence, an expression of such a quest for a third way between scepticism and extreme voluntarism, is less secular and more empirical than received wisdom admits of the project of a normative theory of social life on an empirical basis yielded as a side-effect a systematic, self-contained, and empirical economic theory. The main tool for building such a theory, namely a view of societal laws as embedded in trans-individual mechanisms, derives from the voluntarist view of natural law as ‘imposed’ law.

This article discusses the works of the first two lecturers on natural law in Copenhagen, Henrik Weghorst and Christian Reitzer. Contrary to the existing scholarship which characterises their works as derivative of either Grotius or Pufendorf, the article argues that the character and significance of these works can only be grasped when understood in light of the local intellectual traditions on which they built. Seen against this background, it becomes clear that Weghorst and Reitzer developed significantly different theories of natural law, disagreeing on such fundamental issues as the definition of law, the moral good, and the role of sociality in natural law. Following a tradition of Christian natural law in Kiel, Weghorst developed a theory of natural law fundamentally critical of the secularising theories of Grotius and Pufendorf, while Reitzer followed Pufendorf and his disciple Christian Thomasius in Halle. The article concludes by indicating how Weghorst's and Reitzer's works established the framework for discussions of natural law in the first decades of the eighteenth century, suggesting the need for further research into the significance of natural law for the early enlightenment in Denmark-Norway.

journal article published in Korean - 근대 초기 유럽 자연법의 세계관과 정치사상

Natural jurisprudence was one of the most important intellectual traditions, along with republicanism, that weighed upon early modern European thought. If Republicans were concerned with popular Libertas and the health of states, the self-imposed task of natural lawyers was to find out what, in God’s or Reason’s eyes, was right and what was wrong. To live freely in a dynamic society was the goal of republican thought, whereas the priority of natural jurisprudence was to lead a peaceful life in a just society ruled by law. To understand the latter tradition in historical terms, one must grasp its Christian roots and moral worldview. Beyond the post-Enlightenment and French revolutionary concepts of natural rights and democracy appropriated by reformers, this article delineates the basic tenets of natural law from a historical perspective, dealing with its most crucial components such as duties and rights, human nature, social design, and political thought.

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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.

The radical ideas of the French Revolution are generally regarded as the offspring of the theory of social contract. However, even though the Revolutionaries cherished Rousseau’s legacy, the period was not without instances in which this legacy could be subject to variation and the notion of social contract could be attributed, in a decidedly negative tone, less to Rousseau than to Hobbes. In this context, the present study of Jean-Baptiste Salaville’s L’Homme et la société, ou nouvelle théorie de la nature humaine et de l’état social (1799) demonstrates that the idea of natural sociability could provide an opportunity to elaborate a radical republican future without the notion of social contract. Salaville’s political vision, built on the tradition of natural jurisprudence, posited a new idea of the general will and empiricist legislation in the last days of the French Revolution.

In this paper, I develop three ideal types of early modern federal theories: sovereignty relativizing federalism, sovereignty pooling federalism, and bottom-up federalism. Each of these types respond to a different political effect of the development of the modern state: organ sovereignty, hostile geopolitical environment, and disempowerment of the society as a corollary to organ sovereignty, respectively. Each of these types conceives of the federation as an alternative to the state. I compare and contrast these types along the lines of implementation of the federal principle of self- and shared rule, the criteria of evaluation of federal arrangements, and the normative implications.

This paper analyzes the relation between basic religious motifs of theoretical thought, general ontology and their specific use in 'international' political theory at the onset on the Modern Era. The analysis is based on Herman Dooyeweerd's reformational philosophy in identifying the basic assumptions on the origin of life, coherence and diversity of reality in several trends of thought. The Greek and Roman classical legacy, in combination with ancient Christian concepts, is emphasized, namely in terms of motifs such as Nature and Grace, guidelines of scholastic worldview, thus influencing its perspective of Christianity, of the Holy Roman Empire and of the Papacy. Reformed Protestantism adopted a more radically Biblical set of assumptions which culminated in a ontologically plural perspective of social authority and political community, as well as of the empire. Christian humanism, and some Protestant thinkers, was also heavily influenced by the motifs of Nature and Grace, but now with a strict separation between both 'logics'. The theorization of an 'internal logic' for each of these spheres gave origin to a reinterpretation of Nature in classical Humanism, according to a 'mechanistic' perspective of reality with its ideal of control. Another religious motif of this secularized form of humanism was the concept of Liberty and of personality. This geometrical theoretical mode influenced ideas on the social contract and its international analogy, leading theoricians to fiery debates on the classification of the Empire.

Probablemente no haya un término más utilizado dentro del discurso de los derechos humanos que el de la dignidad humana. Se trata de una idea que preside y fundamenta los sistemas constitucionales contemporáneos, constituyendo así en un referente imprescindible para la legislación y la aplicación del Derecho.