The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature

The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature is Andrew Tooke’s English translation of Samuel Pufendorf’s De Officio Hominis et Civis Juxta Legem Naturalem (1673) — the short, teachable compendium of his vast De Jure Naturae et Gentium. It is the missing systematizer of the natural-law tradition between Grotius and Locke.

Sociality as the Ground of Natural Law

Pufendorf’s distinctive move is the foundation he chooses. Where the Scholastics grounded natural law in God’s reason and human teleology, Pufendorf grounds it in a feature of the human condition: man is weak, needy, and unable to survive or flourish alone, yet also quarrelsome. From this he derives a single first principle — sociality:

“this is a fundamental Law of Nature, That every man ought, as much as in him lies, to preserve and promote society.”

— Samuel Pufendorf, The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature (Tooke trans.)

The duties men owe one another are deduced as means to that end: because each person needs the help of others and yet can also harm them, reason dictates that everyone be a useful and beneficial member of society, abstaining from injury, keeping faith, and treating others as natural equals. (Pufendorf is careful that the duties toward God and toward oneself rest on their own foundations and are not all derived from this one maxim.) This sociality principle is Pufendorf’s lasting contribution: a natural law derived from man’s social nature rather than from a contested metaphysics, which made it portable across the confessional divides that the wars of religion had opened (the same problem Grotius had addressed).

Structure

Book I treats the duties of man as such, derived from the law of nature: duties toward God (natural religion), toward oneself (self-preservation, cultivation of one’s faculties), and toward others (the negative duty not to injure, and positive duties of recognition, beneficence, and good faith — including the duties of language, property, contract, and oaths). Book II treats man as a citizen: the natural state, the origins of the family and the state through covenant, the forms of government, the duties of sovereigns and subjects, and the law of war and peace.

Place in This Wiki

Pufendorf is the bridge the natural-law lineage needs. He receives the secularized natural law of Grotius, systematizes it into a deductive science, and hands it to Locke, who read and engaged him. He is a theorist of duty and a defender of strong sovereignty more than of resistance, so he is not a libertarian; the wiki uses him for the sociality foundation and his place in the Grotius→Locke chain, not as an ally.

See Also

• Samuel Pufendorf - author reference
• Natural Law and Natural Order - the tradition this text systematizes
• The Rights of War and Peace - Grotius’s secularized natural law that Pufendorf systematizes
• Sociality - the foundational law of nature this work states
• Second Treatise of Government - Locke’s rights theory downstream of Pufendorf

Sources

• Pufendorf, The Whole Duty of Man (Full Text) - Book I (the law of nature and sociality; duties to God, self, and others) and Book II (the state, sovereignty, and the law of nations); Tooke English translation, Internet Archive OCR