Galtland Index

Sociality

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Sociality

Sociality is the name Pufendorf gives to the single first principle on which he builds the interpersonal law of nature in De Officio Hominis et Civis (1673), cited here through Andrew Tooke’s English The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature. It is not a feeling of fellowship and not a duty to dissolve into a collective, but a claim about the human condition paired with the rule that follows from it: man is too weak to live without his own kind and too dangerous to be trusted unconditionally, so each person must so conduct himself toward others that they have no just cause to harm him. From this one law Pufendorf deduces the duties of not injuring, of treating others as natural equals, and of doing them good — and, beyond these, the truthful speech, promise-keeping, property, and civil order that make cooperation among needy and rivalrous people practicable. The whole apparatus grounds natural law in features of human nature that any observer can recognize.

What Sociality Means

Sociality is not friendliness, sympathy, or the pleasure of company. It is Pufendorf’s name for a rule-generating fact: human life depends on cooperation among beings who can also injure, deceive, dominate, and destroy one another. The point is practical before it is political. No person can secure ordinary human goods alone, yet no one can safely rely on others unless conduct is governed by rules. Sociality is the discipline that combination of dependence and danger requires — the reason the duties among persons are not optional courtesies but requirements of survival, order, and mutual security.

The Fundamental Law of Nature

Pufendorf’s entire account of what men owe one another descends from a single proposition, set out in Book I, Chapter III as the foundation he has been building toward: that every man ought, so far as he is able, to preserve and promote society. He labels this the fundamental law of nature, and treats every other interpersonal precept as a consequence of it. An action that tends generally and is necessary to the preservation of society is on that ground commanded; one that would disturb or dissolve it is on that ground forbidden; all the rest are consequences drawn from this one universal law. The rules of this human fellowship, “without which it falls to pieces”, are precisely what Pufendorf means by the laws of nature.

Two features make the principle load-bearing. First, the object of the duty is carefully specified. The society to be preserved is glossed at once as the welfare of mankind — a good distributed across persons, not a corporate body with claims of its own that could be set against the individuals who compose it. No particular state, majority, or corporate body is thereby made the source of morality. Second, sociality governs above all what one person directly owes another. Pufendorf fences the principle deliberately: the duties of man toward God and toward himself are not derived primarily and directly from sociality (duties toward God may be deduced from it only indirectly, and duties toward oneself arise jointly from religion and from the needs of society), but their immediate footing lies elsewhere. Sociality is the foundation of the law that runs person-to-person.

The Diagnosis of Human Nature

What makes sociality more than a slogan is the way Pufendorf reaches it — not by intuition but by an honest audit of the creature the law is to bind. Man, he writes in the summary of his argument, is intensely desirous of his own preservation, liable to many wants, unable to support himself without the help of those of his kind, and yet “fit in Society to promote a common Good”. The same animal is malicious, insolent, easily provoked, and no less prone to do his fellow mischief than he is able to.

Both halves of that portrait are argued. On the side of need, every advantage of human life comes from the “mutual Help Men afford one another”, so that, next to divine providence, nothing in the world is more beneficial to mankind than men themselves. On the side of danger, Pufendorf insists that man’s proclivity to injure another is in fact stronger than in the brutes, which grow outrageous only through hunger or lust and are soon satisfied; man alone is driven on by an unreasonable desire to possess more than he needs, by the pursuit of glory and pre-eminence, and by envy and emulation — passions unknown to the brutes, and the causes from which most wars arise. He is uniquely capable of harm as well: not through teeth, claws, or horns, but through the activity of his hands and the quickness of his wit, so that it is very easy for one man to bring upon another the greatest of natural evils, death itself. Add to this the vast diversity of human dispositions — as many minds as there are heads — and ordinary life becomes hazardous without careful management.

Sociality is the conclusion forced by this audit. Because each person needs the help of others but cannot count on it — others being equally needy, equally dangerous, and endlessly various — his own preservation requires that he be sociable: that he join with those of his kind and so behave toward them that they have no justifiable cause to do him harm, but rather to promote and secure his interests. The form of the argument matters as much as its content. Sociality is motivated through each individual’s interest in self-preservation, and the unit on which the deduction operates is the person, not the group: society exists because individuals cannot survive alone, not the reverse.

How Sociality Binds: Obligation and the Three Grounds of Natural Law

Pufendorf sorts the duties of man under three heads — toward God, toward oneself, and toward other men — and locates sociality precisely within that scheme. The duties owed to others are derived, he says, primarily and directly from “that Sociality, which we have laid down as a Foundation”, while the duties toward God and toward oneself have a more immediate footing in two further principles. Barbeyrac’s note to the passage, not Pufendorf’s main text, names three grand principles of natural right — religion, the love of ourselves, and sociability — from which, respectively, the duties toward God, toward self, and toward one’s neighbour flow; in Pufendorf’s main text, sociability is the direct foundation for the duties owed to other men, while duties toward God and toward self have different immediate grounds. Sociability is the one that yields everything due from a man to his fellows.

What turns these rules into laws rather than mere counsels of prudence is a further step. The precepts of natural law are not arbitrary decrees: they are the means required by the end of preserving human life in society, and reason, examining man’s own nature and condition, can see which actions preserve society and which disturb or dissolve it. But rational necessity is not yet obligation. The precepts of sociality obtain the force of law only on the supposition that there is a God who governs the world by his providence and has enjoined them on men through the light of reason born with them; absent that supposition, one might observe them for their utility — as one follows a physician’s directions for the sake of health — but not as laws. Pufendorf reads the social life as positively enjoined by God upon men, and goes further still: he makes religion a precondition of sociality itself, holding that man could not become a sociable creature were he not imbued with religion, and that reason in religion reaches only so far as it serves “the common Tranquillity and Sociality” of this life. The obligation to be sociable is thus both anthropological in its motive and theistic in its binding force.

The Duties That Descend From Sociality

Sociality is fertile: from it Pufendorf draws the catalog of duties every man owes every other. The work’s title signals the frame — it is a treatise of officia, duties, and sociality is a duty before it is a right; the subjective rights it yields (to be left unharmed, to receive reparation) are derived from that prior duty. He first distinguishes absolute duties — owed by every man to every man, whatever his station — from conditional ones that arise only within particular relations such as parent and child, husband and wife, master and servant, or sovereign and subject. The duties of sociality proper are the absolute ones, and he ranks three.

Not injuring. First and amplest is the duty of doing no wrong — “that one do no Wrong” to another. Pufendorf calls it at once the easiest of duties, since it consists chiefly in an omission of acting, and the most necessary, since without it human society cannot be preserved — for a man can live at peace with one who does him no good and with whom he has no dealings, provided only that he does him no harm. The duty fences both what we hold by the bounty of nature — life, body, limbs, chastity, liberty — and whatever becomes our property by human institution or compact. It is what makes “Crimes, by which any Wrong is done to others” of acts such as “Murther, Wounding, Striking, Rapine, Theft, Fraud, Violence”, whether done directly or indirectly. And it carries reparation with it: whoever is truly chargeable as the author of a wrong is bound, as far as in him lies, to make reparation, since otherwise the precept that no man be hurt would be to no purpose, and the doer of injury would keep the fruit of his violence unredressed.

Natural equality. Second is the duty to acknowledge the natural equality of men: that every man esteem and treat another as naturally his equal — as “a Man as well as he”. The endowments nature distributes unequally give no one a larger liberty to insult his fellows or a greater share of common rights; nor can mean fortune set any man so low that he loses the enjoyment of those rights. No man who has no peculiar title may arrogate more to himself than he is ready to allow to others, because the obligation of maintaining sociality binds every man equally, and no one may violate the law of nature in any part more than another.

Mutual humanity. Third is the duty of humanity, which requires more than abstaining from injury: that every man promote his neighbour’s good “as far as conveniently he may”, through good offices, beneficence, gratitude, and the keeping-up of common brotherly love. Mere non-injury makes peace possible; humanity makes society flourish.

Pufendorf grades these duties by their enforceability, and the grading is part of how sociality works. The claim to be left unharmed, to reparation, and to the performance of covenants is a perfect right — one that may be compelled, by one’s own power or by superior authority. The good offices of humanity that go beyond non-injury are owed under an imperfect obligation: they may fairly be desired, and their refusal may be charged as unkindness or hard dealing, but they cannot be exacted by force. Simple ingratitude is base, but it is not the same kind of wrong as theft or breach of contract. Sociality thus draws a hard, enforceable floor of non-injury and contract, and above it a softer, non-compellable expectation of beneficence; it requires both strict justice and humane conduct without turning every failure of generosity into a claim enforceable by force.

Speech, Promises, and Property

If the three absolute duties are owed by every man to every man whatever his station, a further set of duties arises from the instruments cooperation requires — duties that depend on human acts and institutions rather than binding unconditionally, but that answer to the same need. Because people can coordinate only through signs others can understand, speech is a necessary instrument of society, and deception by words or customary signs violates the very use for which discourse exists. Beyond the bare humanity of beneficence, men need definite, reliable performances from one another and need to know what they may demand in return; Pufendorf therefore treats promise-keeping and contract as natural-law obligations, since without them much of the advantage that comes from mutual exchange and assistance would be lost.

Property follows the same logic. Pufendorf presents it not as a pre-social fact but as a human institution introduced for peace, order, and the regular use of things, in which an initial common use gives way to possession, division, occupation, inheritance, transfer, and contract because finite, rivalrous people need settled claims if they are to avoid quarrels and make stable use of the world. Property is therefore not outside sociality but one of the devices by which sociality is made practicable among needy and contending persons.

Civil Society

Sociality is not the same as the state, and Pufendorf is careful to separate them. Men need society with their fellows, but they are not thereby directly or automatically inclined to form commonwealths; families, primitive societies, promises, and contracts can satisfy many natural needs before civil government appears. Civil society arises from a further problem. The law of nature binds, but in the natural state there is no common superior to settle disputes, compel performance, and restrain those who ignore reason, conscience, or fear of divine judgment, so each man must rely on his own single power. The remedy is the commonwealth — formed through covenant, constitutional decision, and submission to a governing authority charged with common safety — in which the force of all is engaged on the side of each.

The state is therefore not the source of sociality but its guarantor: the same diversity and dangerousness of men that makes sociality necessary is, in Book II, Pufendorf’s argument for a civil sovereign who can enforce the law of nature among them. Sociality is the floor of the interpersonal order; civil society is the institution meant to secure the peace, protection from injury, reliable adjudication, and coordinated use of common force that sociality already requires.

Significance and Place in the Natural-Law Lineage

Sociality’s importance is methodological as much as moral. By grounding the law of nature in an empirical description of human need and human danger rather than in a contested metaphysics of the good, Pufendorf turned natural law into a deductive science: a single observable principle, drawn from facts any honest observer can recognize, is made to generate the whole interpersonal law of nature by consequence. And it makes that law social without making it collectivist. The starting point is the individual — self-preserving, dependent, rational, dangerous, and accountable — and the conclusion is not that the person exists for an abstract whole but that each can preserve himself only under rules that also preserve peace with others.

Tooke’s edition repeatedly cross-references Grotius’s De Jure Belli ac Pacis, placing Pufendorf in the Grotian natural-law conversation. This wiki accordingly reads him as the systematizer standing between Grotius and Locke in the natural-law lineage — the figure who supplies a single deductive foundation where Grotius had left the matter diffuse — and treats sociality’s non-injury core as an antecedent to the equal-natural-rights argument of Locke’s Second Treatise of Government and to the later liberal and libertarian traditions; see those linked articles.

The negative core of sociality is the point of contact with that later tradition. Pufendorf’s vocabulary is duties-first and theistic, not the rights-first idiom of modern libertarianism, and he should not be read as a proto-libertarian without that caveat — the same anthropology that grounds non-injury also grounds an enforcing state, and the obligation to be sociable rests for him on a divine lawgiver. But the mechanism is recognizably the same: peaceful association requires an enforceable duty against injury, reparation for wrongs, recognition of natural equality, stable property, truthful speech, and reliable contracts. That cluster — the duty not to injure another’s person or property, paired with reparation and read among natural equals — is an early natural-law version of the rule this wiki treats under nonaggression and property rights. Sociality is the hinge between anthropology and law in Pufendorf’s system: human beings need one another and can also ruin one another, and the law of nature exists to make that dangerous dependence livable.

See Also

Sources

  • Pufendorf, The Whole Duty of Man (Full Text) - Book I, Chapter III for the fundamental law of nature and the anthropological diagnosis of human weakness and dangerousness (Barbeyrac’s note to the chapter, not Pufendorf’s main text, supplies the three grand principles — religion, self-love, sociability — paired with the duties toward God, self, and neighbour); Chapters VI–VIII for the absolute duties of not injuring (with the catalog of crimes and the rule of reparation), natural equality, and mutual humanity, plus the further duties of truthful discourse, promise-keeping, contract, and property as a human institution; the perfect/imperfect distinction; and Book II on the natural state, civil society, and the civil sovereign — in Andrew Tooke’s English translation (Liberty Fund OLL clean eBook text of the Tooke edition; the fundamental maxim “every man ought, as much as in him lies, to preserve and promote society” is now quoted verbatim)

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