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Pufendorf was born in Dorfchemitz, Saxony, Germany on 8 January 1632. He matriculated at Leipzig University in 1650. First he studied theology, but found it dogmatic and turned to philosophy, philology and history. After two years he moved to Jena, concentrating on mathematics, the Cartesian demonstrative method and the natural law writings of Grotius and Hobbes.

After completing his Magister degree in 1658 he secured an engagement as a tutor in the family of the Swedish ambassador in Copenhagen. Shortly thereafter hostilities broke out between the two Nordic rivals. Disregarding diplomatic privileges, the Danes seized the Swedish retinue and accused Pufendorf of espionage. During eight months of harsh captivity, with no access to learned books, he reflected on his university studies and wrote down a system of jurisprudence. After his liberation, he journeyed with his pupils to the Netherlands, where his work was published in 1660 as Elementorum Jurisprudentiae Universalis (Elements of Universal Jurisprudence). This work is considered the first useful textbook on natural law and it earned Pufendorf an enviable reputation and a professorship at the University of Heidelberg.

Here he published, anonymously, his historical and political work De Statu Imperii Germanici (On the Constitution of the German Empire). It contains a devastating criticism of the condition of public law within the Empire resulting from the Thirty Years’ War, and suggested a path to its regeneration through a European commonwealth of sovereign states based on natural and international law. The imperial censor banned the book, but it was reprinted time and again, translated into several languages, and distributed across Europe. By 1710, some 300,000 copies had been printed in Germany alone. Pufendorf’s reputation was now extended to nonacademic circles. He achieved both fame and criticism.

In 1668 Pufendorf moved to the newly established university in Lund, Sweden. In 1672 he published his magnum opus De Naturae et Gentium (On the Law of Nature and Nations) in eight books, and the year after an abridged popularized version, De Officio Hominis et Civis (On the Duty of Man and Citizen), in two books.

In all, 44 editions of his major work have been published. It has been translated into English, French, German and Italian. His popularized version became, in modern parlance, an international bestseller. It has been translated into nine European languages, published in more than 150 editions in tens of thousands of copies. For more than 100 years they were among the most read academic books. The classicists Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hutcheson, Hume, Smith and countless more all studied and built on his works. Due to Pufendorf’s works and reputation, natural law became part of university studies in jurisprudence, philosophy and ethics at most Protestant universities.

A new war resulted in the closing of Lund University in 1677. Pufendorf became royal historiographer in Stockholm. In the following years, he introduced empirical studies of the archives, and published 33 volumes of historical studies. He is regarded as a progenitor of 19th-century historicism.

In 1688 Pufendorf moved to Berlin as historiographer and judicial councillor at the court of Prussia. He continued his works on historical and theological issues. He died on 16 October 1694 of blood poisoning, contracted on a return journey from Stockholm, where he had been elevated to the nobility as a baron. He is buried in St. Nikolai Church in Berlin.

Pufendorf attempted in his works on natural law to mediate and unify Hobbes’s natural law doctrine of ‘egoism’ and ‘a war of all against all’ with Grotius’s natural law doctrine of ‘man’s inclination towards society’. His writings include ethics, jurisprudence, government, and political economics. These are seen as integral parts of a totality.

The foundation for his treatment is his theory of human behaviour, where the driving force is the interaction between man’s self-interest and his existence as a social being. Man seeks society with his fellow man for the fulfilment of his own needs and desires. Man’s sociable inclination is not innate; it must be cultivated. He also used his theory of the social man to create his historical account of the rise of property when society changes from hunting and gathering through agriculture to a commercial society. Individuals in a commercial society will need goods and services produced by others, because their own time and resources will fail to give them many necessary goods. On the other hand, individual men can contribute many things to the use of others. However, this will come to nothing if these individuals could not exchange and barter their different goods and services. When a society based on private property grew, it therefore brought with it commerce, the growth of markets, the creation of prices and the introduction of money. The theoretical foundation of a commercial society, in which all individuals attempt to satisfy their own needs and thereby satisfy the need of others, is therefore the cornerstone in his natural law theory.

Price is divided into ordinary and eminent. The former is found in the properties of goods and services in so far as they afford service and pleasure for man. The latter is found in money as a common standard for their measurement. The price of a good or service is determined by the interaction between ‘the aptitude’ (utility) of it and the scarcity of it: in modern parlance, demand and supply. The price will rise towards a level where it covers the normal costs that accrue during production and transport. Lack of need (demand) lowers the price, but price will also be lowered if the number of suppliers increases. Pufendorf therefore comes very close to a Marshallian demand-and-supply analysis. In addition, the price will change if the quantity of money changes. Pufendorf seems to recognise the Snob and Veblen effects, externalities and differences in the elasticity of demand.

Pufendorf also presents his views concerning the state and the distribution of power, the state’s right to tax, and the principles of taxation. Here he discusses weighted voting, qualified majorities and what has been known as single-peaked preferences.

It was the diffusion of these theories through popularization which laid the foundation for the progress of economics as a science.

See Also

Selected Works

  • 1660. Elementorum Jurisprudentiæ Universalis Libri Duo [The elements of universal jurisprudence]. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931.

  • 1672. De Jure Naturae et Gentium Libri Octo [On the law of nature and nations]. New York/London: Oceana Publications Inc./Wiley & Sons Ltd., 1933; reprinted 1964.

  • 1673. De Officio Hominis et Civis. Trans. M. Silverthorne as On the duty of man and citizen according to natural law, ed. J. Tully. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.