Samuel Pufendorf

Samuel von Pufendorf (1632–1694) enters this wiki through The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature, the English of his 1673 compendium of natural law and the systematizing link in the natural-law lineage.

Place in This Wiki

Pufendorf was a German jurist, historian, and political philosopher — professor at Heidelberg and Lund, later historiographer to the Swedish and Brandenburg courts. His great work De Jure Naturae et Gentium (1672) and its popular abridgement De Officio Hominis et Civis (1673) made natural-law theory a systematic, widely-taught science across Protestant Europe. The wiki uses him for one role: the figure who stands between Grotius and Locke, grounding the law of nature in human sociality and handing a deductive natural-law apparatus to the moderns Locke drew on.

He is not a libertarian: he emphasized duty over rights and defended strong sovereign authority. His relevance here is the lineage role and the sociality foundation, not a political program.

See Also

• The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature - the work present in this wiki
• Sociality - Pufendorf’s foundational law of nature: because man is needy yet prone to harm, every person must so behave that others have no just cause to injure him
• Natural Law - The wiki’s natural-law hub: the classical lineage of reason-knowable justice above positive law, from Aristotle and Cicero through Aquinas, Grotius, Locke

Sources

• Pufendorf, The Whole Duty of Man (Full Text) - the basis for this profile