Hobbes and Pufendorf write in Grotius’s wake and take early modern natural law in very different directions. Hobbes attempts to ground his moral and political philosophy in metaphysical materialism and to construct morality and the state with lean materials. A standard view is that he does this on a basis of psychological and rational egoism. This is too simple a view, as reciprocity plays a largely unappreciated role in his moral philosophy. For his part, Pufendorf may seem to be an orthodox theological voluntarist, grounding morality in divine command. On analysis, however, his views prove to be much more interesting. Pufendorf has deep insights about the conceptual conditions of accountability to God – namely, that those subject to divine command be able to hold themselves accountable in their own practical reasoning. And sociability plays an important role in his thought also, though somewhat differently from Grotius.

Pufendorf was a political humanist, that is, an intellectual who engaged with political and religious thought through an erudite philological and analytical scrutiny of classical and modern texts in these fields. Born into a Saxon Lutheran clerical household in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War, he had first-hand experience of religious and political conflict during his childhood. His mastery of Latinate humanistic erudition was formed through his rhetorical education at the Grimma grammar school and then through his studies in history, philology and politics at the University of Leipzig. Pufendorf used his humanistic erudition as a key resource in his fundamental reconstruction of the discipline of natural law in his Law of Nature and Nations of 1672. In this work he sought to provide a model of political authority suited to governing divided religious communities, in part to defend the Protestant religion against the threat of political Catholicism, but primarily to achieve peaceful co-existence among different religions under the umbrella of a secular sovereign state. His work as an historian and political adviser to the Swedish and Brandenburg courts reflects the engaged nature of his humanistic learning.

The name of Pufendorf is often associated with the phrase that appeared in his 1667 tract about the Holy Roman Empire: it was, he observed, ‘monstro simile’ (like a monster). To many generations of scholars from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the phrase seemed appropriate since they viewed the Holy Roman Empire as an anachronism that was doomed for centuries before it expired in 1806. Yet Pufendorf himself denied that he wished to condemn the empire but rather claimed he wanted to improve it and to create a better understanding of it; indeed, he removed the phrase from the second edition of his text. This chapter examines Pufendorf’s writing about the empire in the context of the political situation of his time and considers his work as a constructive and positive contribution to a wide-ranging debate. This explains why his 1667 tract was regarded so highly in the eighteenth century as one of the best short guides to the nature and politics of the empire, which scholars have only recently begun to appreciate once more.

This chapter gives an account of Pufendorf’s discussion and use of the law of nations. It first outlines his distinctive contribution to contemporary discussions of the topic, namely his rejection rejection, against Grotius, of a specific “positive” law of nations distinct from the law of nature. Secondly it explains how this position relied on Pufendorf’s voluntarist conception of law as the command of a superior and on his conception of the state of nature as devoid of such superiors. The law of nations was simply the law of nature applied to states as composite persons in the state of nature, and the treaties and alliances concluded between them could not amount to a separate and obligatory law of nations. Thirdly, against this background, the chapter shows how Pufendorf discussed the law of war, disentangling the perfect and imperfect obligations of the law of nations from custom, civil laws, and pacts and agreements. Finally, the chapter analyses Pufendorf’s own casuistic use of the law of nations in the various polemical works he published in the service of his sovereigns, especially the King of Sweden, often in line with the theoretical position he developed but also departing from it when opportune.

In providing a new foundation for natural law and thence political authority, Pufendorf engaged in a major and explicit reconstruction of the discipline. Scholastic natural law derived the law of nature from a prior nature held to contain norms for moral and civil conduct; for example, from a divine nature whose will imprinted the human will, or a rational nature that was supposed to guide the will, or from humanity’s supposedly sociable nature as the source of the key norm of sociality. Pufendorf’s radical intervention into this field lay in his declaration that since it had been “imposed” or instituted as a “moral entity” by God for unaccountable reasons, human nature was not itself normative, rationally or socially. Rather, as a set of given conducts and predispositions—seen most clearly humanity’s paradoxical need for co-operation in order to survive and its ineradicable proclivity to envy, malice and mutual predation—human nature supplied only the observable basis from which it was possible to deduce the natural law: that man should cultivate sociality as a disposition needed for security and social thriving. This formed the basis for political sovereignty as the unchallengeable deployment of civil power required to obtain social peace and security.

From the 16th century onwards, the German academy offered a home for the most intensive reflection about modern statehood. German professors used the vocabulary of ius naturae et gentium (law of nature and of nations) to adapt the insights they had applied to the constitution of the Roman–German Empire to the world of European diplomacy in general. Statehood, it was suggested, was an instrument for the community to govern its affairs in a rational way. The notion of the Christian paterfamilias was given a secular meaning in the theory of the ruler as the manager of the state-machine that was to be operated under the instructions produced by a rational science of natural law. The fact that the practice of 18th-century diplomacy was hard to confine within the strictures of natural law theory, gave legal doctrine an often sceptical tone that pushed it ever closer to raison d’état.