The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature

by Samuel von Pufendorf

Samuel Pufendorf's seminal work, The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature (first published in Latin in 1673), was among the first to suggest a purely conventional basis for natural law. Rejecting scholasticism’s metaphysical theories, Pufendorf found the source of natural law in humanity’s need to cultivate sociability. At the same time, he distanced himself from Hobbes’s deduction of such needs from self-interest. The result was a sophisticated theory of the conventional character of man’s social persona and of all political institutions.

Pufendorf wrote this work to make his insights accessible to a wide range of readers, especially university students. As ministers, teachers, and public servants, they would have to struggle with issues of sovereignty and of the relationship between church and state that dominated the new state system of Europe in the aftermath of the Peace of Westphalia (1648).

The Whole Duty was first translated into English in 1691. The fourth edition was significantly revised—by anonymous editors—to include a great deal of the very important editorial material from Jean Barbeyrac’s French editions. This was reproduced in the fifth edition from 1735 that is republished here. The English translation provides a fascinating insight into the transplantation of Pufendorf’s political theory from a German absolutist milieu to an English parliamentarian one.

Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694) was one of the most important figures in early-modern political thought. An exact contemporary of Locke and Spinoza, he transformed the natural law theories of Grotius and Hobbes, developed striking ideas of toleration and of the relationship between church and state, and wrote extensive political histories and analyses of the constitution of the German empire.

Jean Barbeyrac (1674–1744) was a Huguenot refugee who taught natural law successively in Berlin, Lausanne, and Amsterdam, and edited and translated into French the major natural law works of Grotius, Pufendorf, and Cumberland.

Andrew Tooke (1673–1732) was headmaster of Chaterhouse School and professor of geometry at Gresham College, London.

Ian Hunter is Australian Professorial Fellow in the Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland.

David Saunders is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Arts at Griffith University.

Knud Haakonssen is Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Sussex, England.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, Law, Classics

399 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1673

About the author

Baron Samuel von Pufendorf was a German jurist, political philosopher, economist, statesman, and historian. His name was just Samuel Pufendorf until he was ennobled in 1684; he was made a Freiherr (baron) a few months before his death in 1694. Among his achievements are his commentaries and revisions of the natural law theories of Thomas Hobbes and Hugo Grotius.

Reviews

[Ethan Rogers · Rating 3 out of 5]

Since this is a digest of his very long work (which I kind of want to read), it doesn't have the kind of sustained argumentation I was hoping for. But all the same, it is a very coherent exposition of principles of natural law that are still largely consistent with Western mores three hundred years later. We still consider it necessary for everyone to abide by agreements and organize mutual defenses against human aggression.

"Natural law" is the phrase used in Pufendorf's age to refer to principles of morality that hold for all possible societies and that is known through reason. It is contrasted with divine law, which is known by special revelation, and civil law, which can be formulated in one way or another at the discretion of a sovereign. (I tend to think that they called it "law" mostly by analogy with those other two categories. So it's not surprising that a decline of interest in the substance of ecclesial law was accompanied by a decline in interest in the term "natural law.")

I admire the effort to describe certain principles of human morality that are constant across time and cultures, and I think this kind of thinking deserves to be preserved even where the imaginary of "law" loses it salience. Excepting his tendency to assume that human social institutions are formed by agreement and not by status (plenty of cultures are way more status based than that of modern Europe and this raises questions about whether a more general account of status relations than Pufendorf offers would be appropriate for natural law) it's not as easy as one might think to find clear ethnographic counter examples to most of the moral principles that Pufendorf outlines. One doesn't have to read Pufendorf specifically, but I think some exposure to the natural law tradition is valuable. I would personally recommend the intro to Grotius' Law of War and Peace over this digest.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okay, five stars is pretty good. Pufendorf is not particularly famous today, but he, along with Hugo Grotius, were pretty important in the 17th century for their theories of natural law. This text is particularly clear, though the fact that it is his compendium of a much longer work means that many conclusions are asserted more than they are supported. If you are interested in the development of non-Catholic versions of natural law, this is a great book to read.

[Lady of the Ashes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pufendorf examines the laws and morals of society. Thought provoking

[Jonathan]

Rebind

[Craig Bolton]

Pufendorf: On the Duty of Man and Citizen according to Natural Law (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) by Samuel Pufendorf (1991)

[Craig Bolton]

"WHOLE DUTY OF MAN, ACCORDING TO THE LAW OF NATURE, THE (Natural Law Paper) by SAMUEL PUFENDORF (2002)"