The reader has before them one of the most important works of Pufendorf scholarship to appear in the latter part of the twentieth century. The fact that Fiammetta Palladini’s Samuel Pufendorf discepolo di Hobbes was first published in Italian in 1990 takes away none of its freshness or intellectual excitement.1 That is because it is a work produced by a scholar and intellectual whose achievement it was to cut through the existing field of Pufendorf studies with a razor intelligence, laying bare its inherited templates and tacit assumptions. Palladini was thus able to peel back the ‘Grotian’ commentary in which the great thinker had been shrouded, revealing a Pufendorf well-known in the 1680s—a formidable and dangerous natural jurist and political theorist—but doubly obscured in the 1980s, by a philosophical history that flew too high to see him, and by a commentary literature that too often did not like what it saw.
David Saunders’ remarkable translation carries Palladini’s argument into English with maximum fidelity, delivering its analytical precision, revisionist force, and scholarly depth to a new audience. Saunders has thus made a work steeped in the Italian tradition of erudite intellectual history available for a second and wider reception in the world of anglophone scholarship, beyond the initial italophone reception that has already established the book’s scholarly reputation among historians of political thought.2 Through Saunders’ English, an anglophone readership gains access to a distinctively pufendorfian style of political thought—beset by enemies, stretched by inner complexity, and tinged with danger—that was first revealed by Palladini.3
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The figure who embodies this intellectual danger, and whom Palladini’s research reveals looming in the wings of Pufendorf’s magnificent intellectual theatre, is the English political scientist Thomas Hobbes. A good deal of prior commentary had sought to inoculate Pufendorf from hobbesian contamination by casting the former as defending a natural law grounded in natural sociability against the latter’s derivation of this law from the war of all against all and the sovereign who ended it. It is this opposition between the sociable Pufendorf and the anti-social Hobbes that Palladini set out to dismantle and then completely reconfigure, transforming Pufendorf from the English thinker’s opponent into his disciple.
Deploying an argument whose intellectual élan is supported by a meticulous textual scholarship, Palladini provides an unprecedented account of Pufendorf’s hobbesian discipleship. As she makes clear, this was not just a matter of what the Saxon natural jurist borrowed from the English civil scientist, although the evidence that Palladini assembles of Pufendorf’s borrowings from Hobbes’s De Cive and Leviathan puts this beyond doubt.4 It was more interestingly that Pufendorf’s own most original steps in the reconfiguration of natural law thought tracked those of Hobbes. As each thinker took up the task of supplying a new post-scholastic architecture for ethics and politics, they arrived at remarkably similar solutions to key problems.5 This meant that when Pufendorf lifted his thought to a new intellectual plateau he found that he shared this space with Hobbes, leading him to respect the Englishman’s acuteness even while departing from certain of his doctrines. In Palladini’s account, what makes Pufendorf into Hobbes’s disciple is the fact that he solved the central problems of post-scholastic natural law in an original manner, but only through ‘intense conversation’ with Hobbes (6). Palladini’s Pufendorf thus thinks with a ‘hobbesian mind’ or ‘hobbesian heart’ (243), and yet the originality of his engagement with the English thinker means that her book is about Pufendorf’s natural law thought rather than Hobbes’s.
At the center of Palladini’s study, and forming the crucial nexus between Pufendorf and Hobbes, is the litmus question of whether human nature should be regarded as the source of ethical and political norms.6 An affirmative answer to this question had been foundational for scholastic and Christian-Stoic forms of natural law. Ascribing an inherent rationality and sociability to human nature, these traditions had envisaged man as capable of channeling the norms by which the divine mind ordered the cosmos and the polis, or else as able to attune his thought and conduct to a normative order that was given in nature. By treating moral judgments as nothing more than reflections of desires and aversions rooted in man’s material passions, Hobbes had taken a wrecking-ball to these traditions. He had then rebuilt the architecture of natural law around a norm of conduct—sociality—that, rather than being preordained in nature or commanded by reason, was instead a comportment to be attained by disciplinary arrangements embodied in the sovereign and the state.
The arc of Palladini’s account of Pufendorf’s hobbesian discipleship is formed by her careful tracking of different phases in Pufendorf’s complex and multifaceted engagement with Hobbes’s reconstructed norm of sociality, now understood as a required comportment rather than as an endowment of nature or God. This is an itinerary that begins with Pufendorf’s early work, the Elementa jurisprudentiae universalis (Elements of Universal Jurisprudence) of 1660, where Palladini sees him engaging deeply with Hobbes, yet rejecting many of the latter’s key arguments, and continuing to endorse a notion of natural good as the fundamental norm of ethics and politics.7 In the work of his ‘maturity’, however, his De jure naturae et gentium of 1672, Pufendorf had embraced the hobbesian reconstruction of natural law around sociality as a conduct to which humans could only be obligated by a ‘superior’.8 The warmth of this embrace, however, did not preclude a certain wariness on Pufendorf’s part about how closely he could cleave to certain hobbesian doctrines, pertaining to natural war and natural right, the effectivity of natural law in the state of nature, and the dependence of justice on the commands of the civil sovereign. Finally, in the emendations and additions that appeared in the second edition of the De jure in 1684, and which she was the first to study, Palladini detects a significant retreat from the hobbesian mainline of the first edition. This airbrushing of the hobbesian presence was signaled by the appearance of notions of ‘natural good’ and the ‘nature of things’ that Pufendorf borrowed from Richard Cumberland’s De legibus naturae of 1672, an anti-hobbesian work by an English theologian steeped in Christian Stoicism.9 Whether Pufendorf’s late anti-hobbesian swerve was a feint to deflect the storm of scholastic criticism that had broken over the De jure, or whether under this pressure Pufendorf had begun to delude himself about the hobbesian character of the first edition, are possibilities that Palladini leaves open for discussion and further research.
There is, however, nothing indecisive or shrinking about this book. Lobbed into the trenches of late twentieth-century natural law scholarship, it was a revisionist grenade whose central argument regarding Pufendorf’s hobbesian discipleship landed with explosive force.10 This argument was aimed in particular against a pair of twinned traditions of post-war Pufendorf scholarship: one that presented him as an anti-hobbesian follower of Grotius, committed to a doctrine of man’s natural sociability; and another that viewed him as an eclectic mediator between Grotius and Hobbes—someone who used Grotius’s Aristotelian conception of natural sociability to moderate the hobbesian harshness of the war of all against all and the unfettered power of the sovereign.11 By arguing that Grotius’s ambient presence had little impact on Pufendorf’s central doctrines, and that Hobbes’s pervasive influence had been clear from the outset—acknowledged by both Pufendorf and his enemies—Palladini’s revisionist argument was deeply unsettling for the ‘Grotian’ reading of Pufendorf that remained current in the 1970s and 80s. But it remains no less challenging for more recent attempts to keep Pufendorf within the orbit of natural sociability, for example, those seeking to align him with an ‘eclectic’ Grotian conception of rational sociability,12 scholastic doctrines of sociability achieved through man’s faculty of reason,13 or Stoic doctrines of the rational governance of the passions.14
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Palladini divides her account of Pufendorf’s shifting relationship with his intellectual mentor into two parts. In part one of the book she provides a detailed reconstruction of Pufendorf’s intense engagement with Hobbes in the work of his intellectual maturity, the De jure naturae et gentium of 1672. Part two then flanks this account with an equally detailed exegesis of the Cumberlandian additions by which Pufendorf began to tone down his hobbesianism in the 1684 second edition of the De jure, and with an account of the still partially pre-hobbesian natural law of his early Elementa, seeking to shed light on the puzzle of how Pufendorf came to pass as an anti-hobbesian. In order to elucidate the character and degree of Pufendorf’s discipleship in the period of his maturity, Palladini isolates two key topics in the conversation that Pufendorf conducted with his constant intellectual interlocutor: the theory of obligation, and the theme of human nature and the state of nature, through which ‘sociality’ was constructed. These provide Palladini with twin ‘test-benches’ for assessing the mode of Pufendorf’s intellectual engagement with Hobbes.
Citing the many passages from Hobbes’s De cive found in Pufendorf’s De jure, Palladini builds up an account of the shared intellectual platform on which Pufendorf constructed his theory of obligation in dialogue with Hobbes (20–24). The first plank of this platform is the ‘voluntarist’ rejection of the notion of objective or ontological moral values in favor of the doctrine that moral judgments and the moral sense itself are dependent on the willed imposition of a law declaring what is prescribed or prohibited. To this is added the doctrine that while free—in the sense of capable of choosing between different courses of action on the basis of what seems good to him—man is incapable of governing or obligating himself, for example, by willing and acting in accordance with rational knowledge of moral norms or laws. On this basis, Palladini argues, in his De jure Pufendorf follows the fundamental contours of Hobbes’s theory of obligation: that man is only under an obligation—for example, to conduct himself sociably—when he is subject to the laws or command of a ‘superior’ as someone to whom he has submitted his own will. In treating obligation as the moral necessity of acting in accordance with the law or command of a superior, Palladini argues, Pufendorf shows himself to be a hobbesian, simultaneously placing himself at maximum distance from scholastic and Stoic doctrines of obligation understood in terms of the governance of the will in accordance with rationally known objective norms or natural goods.
Given this common platform, it is striking that the bulk of Palladini’s discussion of the obligation ‘test-bench’ is devoted to a detailed discussion of where Pufendorf departs from Hobbes (24–29). This discussion is focused on a series of interlocking questions, concerning whether justice exists in the state of nature, whether in this state there is a hobbesian jus in omnia (a right of everyone to everything), whether the natural law itself is obligatory, whether God’s superiority comes from his supreme power, and whether the civil sovereign’s commands determine what is just and unjust. As Palladini’s incisive commentary makes clear, whether (as Pufendorf argues) justice exists in the state of nature, thereby precluding Hobbes’s jus in omnia and his confinement of justice to sovereign command, depends fundamentally on whether God can be construed as a ‘superior’ in the pufendorfian sense, allowing the natural law to be treated as a divine command, and thereby placing man under its obligation in the state of nature. At the risk of oversimplifying her subtle analysis of this question, Palladini’s argument is that Pufendorf fails to establish that God is a superior in the required sense, and hence fails to show that the natural law is obligatory for man in the state of nature, or that in the final analysis obligation and justice are not dependent on the commands of a hobbesian civil sovereign.
Focused on the complex figure and role of the superior, Palladini’s argument as to why Pufendorf fails to construct an independent non-hobbesian doctrine of obligation is clear enough at one level. Pufendorf’s construction of the superior consists of two elements: first, the power to coerce those who would disobey his laws or commands, and second, the ‘just reasons’ (justa causae) for issuing such commands, where these reasons are understood in terms of the respect or reverence that subjects should feel for the benefaction and protection bestowed on them by the superior (DJN i.6.9–12, pp. 95–103). According to Pufendorf, it is because Hobbes grounds his conception of the superior in power alone that he fails to grasp that man is already obligated by the natural law in the state of nature, where there is no sovereign power; for even in that condition man comprehends that the natural law is the command of a divine superior whose laws are obligatory because of the reverence he feels as creature for the benefactions of the creator. There is little room to doubt Palladini’s forensic argument that, conceived as the command of a divine superior, Pufendorf’s attempt to show that natural law is obligatory in the state of nature is undermined by crippling uncertainties (49). Palladini homes in on the problem that of the two elements required for the pufendorfian superior to impose obligation—coercive power and subjection owing to benefaction—Pufendorf fails to explicate the coercive punishments that would make a divinely imposed natural law obligatory. Once Pufendorf has himself confessed that it remains ‘involved in obscurity’ whether the divine superior’s natural law has sanctions comparable with the punishments imposed by a civil superior (DJN ii.3.21, p. 224), Palladini is surely right to argue that ultimately Pufendorf is forced to give up on the idea that natural law is obligatory in the full juridical sense, allowing it to fade into the domain of ‘imperfect’ or unenforced duties of humanity and conscience (49).
Underlying Palladini’s acute analysis, however, is a deeper intellectual architecture whose character and implications are not so immediately apparent. This concerns the different grounds for Hobbes’s and Pufendorf’s conception of natural law as ‘imposed’ rather than embedded in human nature. For, while Hobbes grounds his conception in the non-moral (or morally indifferent) materialist psychology of man’s natural passions and desires, Pufendorf grounds his in the doctrine that man’s nature is a ‘moral entity’ that must itself be regarded as imposed or instituted by God. In her lucid exposition of Pufendorf’s innovative entia moralia doctrine, Palladini focuses on the fact that in treating man’s moral personhood as imposed for the purposes of his moral governance, Pufendorf was intent on divorcing it from the domain of entia physica, including man’s own (physical) nature, thereby destroying the ontological grounding of natural law in a normative human nature, and treating it instead as a norm imposed by a superior (30–31). Palladini, however, then proceeds to interpret Pufendorf’s distinction between physical and moral entities as equivalent to the distinctions between nature and law, fact and norm, the is and the ought, and then uses this set of distinctions as a grid to interpret the relation between the two parts of Pufendorf’s construction of the superior: the relation between coercive force and subjection based on respect for benefaction (38). Hoisting Pufendorf on his own petard, Palladini argues that in separating power and respect for the law—or coercion and the ‘just causes’ for its exercise—along the axis that separates fact and norm, Pufendorf cannot recombine them in the figure of the superior imposing obligation. This is why he cannot provide a proper explication of the divine or natural punishments needed to make natural law obligatory in the state of nature (41–46).
This is partly because in bringing that assertion back to the domain of the moral entities doctrine we have linked it to one of the aspects of Pufendorf’s thought traditionally (and correctly) considered the one where his originality was at its maximum. But it is also and more importantly because, in the anguished and constantly renewed attempt to ground the difference between natural faculties, capacities and powers and moral faculties, capacities and powers, what we have called the pufendorfian attempt to go beyond Hobbes finds its most explicit expression. (31)
Pufendorf had been so acute in grasping that civil obligation, far from not requiring some higher obligation, fails on its own to ground itself. He had also been so effective in showing that to succeed in grounding sovereignty Hobbes himself had finally to admit an obligation prior to the obligation imposed by the sovereign. And yet in setting out from Hobbes in order to surpass him, Pufendorf failed to demonstrate the indispensable obligatoriness of the law of nature. Once this is realised, we will no longer feel shocked to see that Pufendorf ends by irresistibly returning to Hobbes and making the law of nature a truly paltry bulwark against human malice. (58)
Palladini’s analysis of the second benchmark for testing Pufendorf’s ‘mature’ dependence on Hobbes in the De jure—the theme of human nature, the natural condition, and the norm of sociality—follows the same broad itinerary as her discussion of the theory of obligation. It begins with the establishment of a hobbesian intellectual platform shared by the two thinkers, then tracks several ways in which Pufendorf departed from this, but whose contradictions and weaknesses ultimately saw him return to it. Central to Palladini’s argument here is whether Pufendorf’s derivation of sociality from human nature and the natural condition can escape the enormous gravitational pull of Hobbes’s account of entrance into the civil state—for example, by allowing the natural law to issue in non-state modes of governing sociable relations—or whether the ‘paltry’ character of the natural law bulwark dooms this possibility.
The itinerary of Palladini’s discussion of these issues contains many more paths and branch-lines than her analysis of the theory of obligation. She draws her materials from three of the most difficult chapters of the De jure—chapters 1, 2 and 3 of Book ii—whose account of human nature and the state of nature she then compares with that given in the student digest of the De jure, the De officio hominis et civis of 1673,15 and in his dissertation on man’s natural state, De statu hominum naturali of 1674.16 The role of these latter two texts, though, is to clarify and buttress Palladini’s argument regarding the three key chapters of Book ii of the De jure. The broad arc of this argument is that while the account of human nature provided in De jure ii.1 provides the basis for a derivation of sociality that is congruent with Hobbes’s, the multiplex discussion of man’s natural condition in ii.2 introduces complexities that make it internally contradictory and impossible to reconcile with Hobbes’s account, and this in turn introduced ambiguities into the derivation of sociality in ii.3. The complexities and contradictions flowing from Pufendorf’s treatment of man’s natural condition in ii.2 concern above all their departures from Hobbes’s construction of the state of nature as a condition of entrance into the civil state.
In her discussion of ii.1 Palladini provides an account of the shared pufendorfian-hobbesian platform that will permit the natural law of sociality to be deduced from an account of human nature (72). Man has a nature that requires his governance by law for four reasons: his nature is one whose dignity requires the civilizing arts, but that simultaneously disposes him to mutual envy and violence, is also divided by irreconcilable interests and desires, and is characterized by a natural feebleness (imbecillitas), which means that man must co-operate to survive (DJN II.1.5–8, pp.148–53). From these four features of his nature it is possible to deduce that man should cultivate a sociable attitude and relations in order to make his life possible and dignified.
As can be seen … we arrive at socialitas, it is true, though not as a characteristic of human nature, but rather as the comportment that man must hold to if he is ‘to live and enjoy the good things that in this world attend his condition’. This comportment consists in acting in relation to others in such a way as not to give them the pretext to do harm, but instead reasons to be good. In this passage, then, man’s sociabilis being is not a given in his nature but a moral imperative. Pufendorf does not say ‘Man is naturally sociable’, but rather ‘Man has to be sociable’. It thus seems quite evident that in this passage being sociable is the ideal to which men must aspire and not a natural gift with which they start. (77)
And so, to stay with the cited passages, there is no reason to doubt that Pufendorf introduced into his system a triple consideration of the natural state: now intending it as the human condition imposed by God on men in contrast to the animal condition; now as the culture-less condition in which man finds himself at birth as opposed to a life improved by human help and intervention; and now as the condition of exemption from any form of subjection in contrast to the civil state. (82)
… it is quite clear that all three of these states are termed natural in contrast to what is owed to some human intervention: in the first case, insofar as the condition is considered to be imposed on man by the divinity, not by human will; in the second case, insofar as it is a matter of the condition implied by abstracting from all human inventions and institutions; in the third case, finally, insofar as the condition in question is that of exemption from any form of subjection characteristic of human relations prior to some human deed or pact. (82)
On the one hand, [this logical gap] consists in his having set out from a hypothesis – that of man abandoned to himself – which underlines the lack of human relations rather than the absence of relations of subordination, and in having concluded by foregrounding the wretchedness of a condition characterised essentially by the absence of relations of subordination, such as is that of the vita extra civitates (life outside civil states). On the other hand, it consists in his having started by counterposing the state of nature to all the states that imply a relation of subordination (hence also to the family) and in having ended by counterposing it to just one of these: the civil state. (87–88)
In Palladini’s analysis, these central inconsistences are in turn linked to an even more fundamental ambiguity in the architecture of Pufendorf’s natural law: namely, the question of whether his construction of the state of nature is fundamentally designed to derive the natural law norm of sociality, or whether its prime role is to provide the intellectual motivation for entrance into the civil state. Palladini observes that in the De jure, the tripartite construction of the state of nature is the prelude to the deduction of the norm of sociality, while in the De officio it provides the motivating conditions for entrance into the civil state (95). The inconsistencies in the former construction, however, mean that it is progressively eclipsed by the latter objective, finally transforming Pufendorf’s triplex account of the state of nature into a simplex component of a theory of the state, into which his derivation of sociality is folded: ‘That he had from the outset conceived his theory of the state of nature as a component of the theory of the state is what he himself tells us, namely in what may be regarded as the most successful of the many discussions he provides of the state of nature, and the one getting closest to capturing the spirit of his doctrine’ (97). And at this point, Palladini can return to the results of her analysis of the theory of obligation. After all, she asks, what did we learn from that discussion if not that, conceived within the terms of natural law alone, the cultivation of sociality is the flimsiest of defences against human malice, against which only the coercive laws of the state and its human legislator could be effective? (108).
Thus it is on these crucial points that the importance of the deepening to which Pufendorf subjects Hobbes’s thought is to be measured. This means that whoever aspires to locate Pufendorf in the correct place in the history of natural law and who is not content with producing simplifications good only for the textbooks, but sterile and bereft of any glimmer of authentic understanding, cannot stop at the definitional and simplificatory aspects of his author, to repeat with him that ‘the natural state of men, even when considered apart from commonwealths, is not one of war, but of peace’ (ing ii,2,9), but must reconstruct in full Pufendorf’s agonized reflection on the state of nature and the law that governs it. If he makes this far from easy effort, the reader will see that, below formulations apparently antithetical to the hobbesian formulations, is hidden a way of thinking consonant with that of Hobbes in a fundamental accord, a way of thinking that, while free of any crude submissiveness, sweeps through its whole arc on the trail of the hobbesian problems. (123–24)
Given the fundamentally hobbesian character of Pufendorf’s natural law, the problem posed for Palladini’s account is how it came about that for so long he was regarded as an opponent of Hobbes, at least in certain quarters. And this is the problem to which Palladini dedicates the second part of this book.
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… flowed a sort of retrospective self-delusion, by virtue of which … he ended up by convincing himself that his philosophy and that of Hobbes had totally opposing foundations. Having a need of powerful allies in his battle, he not only set his doctrine under the august banner of stoicism, counterposing this to Hobbes’s epicureanism, but he also convinced himself that Cumberland’s system and his own were perfectly equivalent, to the point where passages from the one could be calmly adopted as illustrations to be incorporated in passages of the other. The consequence was that he became the initiator of the topos of a Pufendorf who – turning himself into an imitator and follower of Grotius – can vaunt, against Hobbes’s anthropological pessimism, the sociable nature of man, thereby laying down principles wholly opposed to those of Hobbes as the foundation of natural law. (150)
Palladini’s discussion of this process traverses four main topics, dealing with Pufendorf’s attempt to provide himself with a respectable place in the history of ethics, his toning-down of the hobbesianism of the De jure through the borrowings from Cumberland’s natural law added to the second edition, the effect of the anti-hobbesian complexion of his early Elementa, and finally the retrospective effects of the anti-hobbesian reception supplied by Pufendorf’s preeminent early modern translator and commentator, Jean Barbeyrac.
According to Palladini, Pufendorf’s attempt to prepare a sanitized place for himself in the history of ethics began as early as the essays in which he sought to defend himself against the charges of hobbism and epicureanism leveled by his Protestant scholastic attackers. It is noteworthy that Palladini regards Pufendorf’s criticisms of Hobbes’s principle of self-preservation in his Epistola ad Scherzerum of 1674 as an instance of this airbrushing (153). According to Palladini, in declaring that he had not sought to derive sociality from the hobbesian principle of self-preservation, but rather from ‘observations regarding the nature of things and man’, Pufendorf was stepping back from the principle that she had detected underlying this derivation, covering his tracks with a more historical approach.19 Palladini sees this same repudiation of the self-preservation principle, on account of its Epicurean taint, repeated in Pufendorf’s Specimen controversiarum of 1678 (154–55).20 Here, in Pufendorf’s advocacy of an observational approach against Hobbes’s ‘mathematical’ deduction of sociality from self-preservation, Palladini identifies a fateful move towards Cumberland’s Stoic conception of sociability as an ontological feature of human nature, opening a portal through which would flow a series of concepts fundamentally at odds with the main hobbesian lines of Pufendorf’s architecture.
In her meticulous analysis of the Cumberlandian borrowings added to the second edition of the De jure—which she was the first to document and study—Palladini identifies three conceptual intruders from Cumberland’s stoic world: the notions of natural good, the natural moral consequences of actions, and the ‘nature of things’ (171–72). As a result of these borrowings, scattered throughout the De jure at critical junctures of the argument, Palladini argues that the crucial gap that Pufendorf had opened between nature and law, fact and norm, the physical and moral worlds—the gap that had allowed sociality to be presented as a comportment to be attained rather than a natural endowment—was eroded and blurred.
The appearance of the notion of natural good and of the associated notions of natural consequences and nature of things therefore introduces into Pufendorf’s doctrine a note that is highly dissonant with the main line of his thought. This has the deleterious effect of obscuring and confusing what has seemed to us to be the principal acquisition of the pufendorfian meditation on Hobbes: the theorisation of the ineradicable difference that stands between nature and law. (184)
… such an influence has the disastrous effect of over-shadowing the most important feature of Pufendorf’s thought, the feature which makes him a hobbesian who goes beyond Hobbes: namely, his theorisation of a sharp distinction between physical entities and moral entities with all its consequences, among them and most particularly the unenforceability of the passage from the facts to the norm. (172)
In her discussion of how it might have come about that Pufendorf imagined that doctrines radically incompatible with his own could be harmoniously incorporated in the revised De jure, Palladini initially entertains two possibilities. Either, Pufendorf was well aware of this incompatibility but cited Cumberland in order to throw his critics off the hobbesian track; or, deceiving himself into believing that he was indeed an anti-hobbesian, Pufendorf borrowed from Cumberland doctrines that he thought were compatible with his own anti-hobbesian doctrines (193–94). In the event, Palladini rejects both possible explanations, developing instead an account in which his Cumberland borrowings indicate Pufendorf’s succumbing to a temptation to abandon the sharp separation between nature and law, fact and norm that he had introduced with his entia moralia doctrine. If, setting aside the enormous pressures imposed by his anti-hobbesian enemies, it should be asked why Palladini thinks that Pufendorf might have succumbed to this temptation, then perhaps the answer lies in a problem that she has located far more deeply within his thought. It is to be found, perhaps, in Palladini’s argument that, so sharp was the break that this doctrine enacted between nature and law, force and reason, that Pufendorf could not make the natural law effectually obligatory within his own system, forcing him to fall back on Cumberland’s stoic notions of natural good and natural consequences.
Palladini’s discussion of the anti-hobbesian aspects of his early Elementa presents no particular challenges, and can be left for the reader to discover, save for the general comment that here her focus is on the Stoic harmony that Pufendorf posits between self-love and sociability in the early work, versus his subordination of sociality to hobbesian self-love and self-preservation in the De jure (214–17). Instead, this account of the intellectual itinerary of the book can conclude with Palladini’s account of Jean Barbeyrac’s contribution to the historical appearance of an anti-hobbesian Pufendorf. Through his extraordinary work of translation and commentary, Barbeyrac enacted a specific anti-hobbesian reception of Pufendorf, making him an important figure for Palladini, and one to whom she has returned in her subsequent scholarship.21
Now, it is easy to see that refusing to acknowledge the requirement of deriving the law of nature from a single principle amounts to denying the aspiration to provide a scientific demonstration of the foundation of morality that Pufendorf shared with Hobbes. So too, insisting that socialitas is an inadequate principle for founding all the duties of man amounts to denying the restriction of morality to the sphere of social relations, which is so characteristic of the secularisation of natural law undertaken by Pufendorf and thus linked to Hobbes’s teaching. Finally, to accuse Pufendorf of having over-valued utility here amounts to denying the very foundation of the pufendorfian system, in which (as we have shown at length above) the hobbesian spirit is most visible. (237)
Perhaps it is fitting to conclude this account of the book’s central arguments with this acute insight into the role of a particular reception context in forming the historical image of the anti-hobbesian Pufendorf. For here in the pull of ethical, religious and political forces that led Barbeyrac towards a conception of sociability grounded in human nature, and thence in no need of the commands of a superior to become obligatory, we recognize similar forces to those that Palladini analyses as pulling Pufendorf in the opposite direction, into the hobbesian orbit, and thence into the conflict zone of his Protestant scholastic reception. It would be unwise to imagine that current readings of Pufendorf, which continue to divide along intellectual and ideological fault-lines, are not similarly inflected, as particular acts of reception, by the ethical, religious, political and also scholarly affiliations of their authors.22
If Palladini’s own reception of Pufendorf were to be characterized as an acute theoretical argument embedded in an erudite mastery of the historical sources and the secondary commentary literature, then that would not be too wide of the mark. In this regard, she stands in a tradition of theoretically informed historical erudition, whose hallmark is to track philosophical arguments through the patient mastery of source texts and contexts, whose modern masters include Arnaldo Momigliano—a frequent visitor to Palladini’s chapter notes—and J.G.A Pocock, and in whose company Palladini so clearly belongs. In this regard, the present introduction is perhaps unavoidably unbalanced, as in focusing on Palladini’s argument it has largely neglected the extensive erudite chapter notes in which this argument is embedded, and through which it engages the entire history of Pufendorf scholarship, as it stood when the book was written and, by easy extrapolation, as it stands today.
In order to compensate for this deficit, I would recommend that the reader attend to such examples as note 2 of the Introduction (7–8). Here, defending her claim that Pufendorf himself openly acknowledged his indebtedness to the ‘acute’ Hobbes, Palladini anchors her argument in a dense citation of sources—private letters, published prefaces, defensive essays, the De jure itself—and in a comprehensive listing of the Englishman’s books contained in Pufendorf’s library, on which Palladini is the acknowledged authority.23 For an instance of the manner in which Palladini’s argument often overflows the chapter limits and expands into dazzling displays of erudition, then the reader need look no further than the long note 42 to chapter 2 of Part 2 (209–11). Here, in her discussion of Pufendorf’s citing of Polybius as a key source for the contested doctrine that justice and injustice only exist inside states, Palladini notes that Pufendorf identified Machiavelli as the careless transmitter of the Polybian teaching into the modern period—by copying it into his Discourses on Livy—with Pufendorf being one of the earliest scholars to discover Machiavelli’s borrowing. But Palladini also comments that Pufendorf was using Machiavelli for his own ends here, since the Florentine himself displayed little interest in Polybius’s restriction of justice to the sphere of civitates. In this regard, Palladini’s use of humanist scholarship to exemplify her argument is in effect echoing the function of Pufendorf’s own erudition.
I refer to the interpretation of I. Fetscher, ‘Der gesellschaftlichen “Naturzustand” und das Menschenbild bei Hobbes, Pufendorf, Cumberland und Rousseau’, in Schmollers Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft 80 (1960): 641–85, who … affirms, in the company of Barbeyrac, that ‘The misunderstanding to which Pufendorf here (intentionally?) succumbs consists in his identification of “right reason” with a completely enlightened (in fact “illuminated”) reason, while Hobbes is concerned only with the thoroughly narrow and limited, unenlightened and errant subjective reason of individuals’ (p. 656),
This interpretation of Fetscher’s is fundamentally undermined by the fact of being almost exclusively based on a passage that, as we will show below (p. 181 with note 38), is added in the second edition of the De iure and alters the main line of P.’s thought. The interpretation – taken up and shared by other authors, for example Denzer, op. cit., pp. 108–09 and Bazzoli, op. cit., p. 310 – stands (as should be clear from the line of argument we develop in this text) at the antipodes of our own. I have sought to demonstrate instead that, on the one hand, for Pufendorf too reason is a calculation of the means appropriate to achieving an end, while, on the other hand, for Hobbes, at least in one of his lines of thought, the calculation that counts is the one that is well-founded.
Palladini thus argues that Fetscher’s portrayal of a stoic Pufendorf stands in the shadow of Barbeyrac’s unjustified opposition of a pufendorfian normative rationality to a hobbesian instrumental reason, an opposition through which Barbeyrac had invoked a capacity for rational self-governance that would dispense with the need for a superior. It is not just Fetscher’s reliance on the Barbeyracian Pufendorf that undermines his position, however. It is also that the passage in which he anchors his interpretation is one of those that Palladini has shown was added by Pufendorf to the second edition of the De jure precisely to disguise the book’s hobbesian character. Here Palladini’s careful philological reconstruction of the text thus not only anchors her argument regarding how Pufendorf came to be received as an anti-hobbesian, but it also shows how this reception was transmitted into the modern period in the work of such important scholars as Fetscher, Denzer and Bazzoli.
Notes
Fiammetta Palladini, Samuel Pufendorf discepolo di Hobbes. Per una reinterpretazione del giusnaturalismo moderno (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990).
For some early reviews, see Thomas Mautner, ‘Review: Samuel Pufendorf discepolo di Hobbes’, Philosophical Books 37 (1991): 171–4. Maurizio Bazzoli, ‘Review: Samuel Pufendorf discepolo di Hobbes’, Rivista di storia della filosofia 47 (1992): 592–6. Thomas Behme, ‘Pufendorf—Schüler von Hobbes?’, in Denkhorizonte und Handlungsspielräume: Historische Studien für Rudolf Vierhaus zum 70. Geburtstag (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1992), 33–52. Tim Hochstrasser, ‘Review: Samuel Pufendorf discepolo di Hobbes’, German History 11 (1993): 99–100. Alfred Dufour, ‘Palladini, Samuel Pufendorf, discepolo di Hobbes—per una reinterpretazione del jusnaturalismo moderno’, Quaderni fiorentini per la storia dei pensiero giuridico moderno 21 (1992): 553–60.
The only prior exposure of some of the book’s arguments in English is Fiammetta Palladini, ‘Pufendorf Disciple of Hobbes: The Nature of Man and the State of Nature: The Doctrine of socialitas’, History of European Ideas 34 (2008): 26–60.
See, for examples, notes 8–14 of the Introduction, (14–15).
There are illuminating accounts of the biographical paths travelled by the two thinkers to reach this shared destination. In the case of Pufendorf, Detlef Döring’s biographical studies are an indispensable source. See, in particular, Detlef Döring, Pufendorf-Studien. Beiträge zur Biographie Samuel von Pufendorfs und zu seiner Entwicklung als Historiker und theologischer Schriftsteller (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1992); Detlef Döring, Samuel Pufendorf in der Welt des 17. Jahrhunderts. Untersuchungen zur Biographie Pufendorfs und zu seinem Wirken als Politiker und Theologe (Frankfurt aM: Vittorio Klostermann, 2012). For Hobbes’s different but intersecting life path, see Noel Malcolm, Editorial Introduction, volume 1 of Thomas Hobbes Leviathan, 3 vols., ed. Noel Malcolm (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2012).
For an appreciation of Palladini’s account of this nexus by a leading Hobbes scholar, see Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 522–24.
The standard modern Latin edition is Samuel Pufendorf, Elementa jurisprudentiae universalis, ed. Thomas Behme (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999). For an English translation, see Samuel Pufendorf, Two Books of the Elements of Universal Jurisprudence, ed. Thomas Behme (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2009).
The modern Latin edition, which is the first to record the textual differences between the first and second editions of the work, is Samuel Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium, 2 vols., ed. Frank Böhling (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998). Based on the 1688 version of the Latin second edition of 1684, the most commonly used English translation is Samuel Pufendorf, The Law of Nature and of Nations in Eight Books, trans. C. H. Oldfather and W. A. Oldfather, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934).
Richard Cumberland, De legibus naturae disquisitio philosophica (London, 1672). In English, Richard Cumberland, A Treatise of the Laws of Nature, ed. Jon Parkin, trans. John Maxwell (1727) (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2005).
See note 2.
Among the important scholarly studies that sought to keep Pufendorf within a Grotian force-field, formed by the twin poles of Aristotelian natural sociability and Stoic rational self-governance, Palladini mentions such works as Horst Rabe, Naturrecht und Kirche bei Samuel Pufendorf: Eine Untersuchung der naturrechtlichen Einflüsse auf den Kirchenbegriff Pufendorfs als Studie zur Entstehung des modernen Denkens (Tübingen: Fabian, 1958); Guido Fassò, Storia della filosofia del diritto, vol. 2 (Bologna: Laterza, 1968); Wolfgang Röd, Geometrischer Geist und Naturrecht: Methodengeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur Staatsphilosophie im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1970); Alfred Dufour, Le mariage dans l’école allemande du droit naturel moderne au XVIIIe siècle: Les sources philosophiques de la Scolastique aux Lumières—La doctrine (Paris: Pichon & Durand-Auzias, 1972), 103–37; Horst Denzer, Moralphilosophie und Naturrecht bei Samuel Pufendorf. Eine geistes - und wissenschaftliche Untersuchung zur Geburt des Naturrechts aus der Praktischen Philosophie (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1972); Richard Tuck, ‘The “Modern” Theory of Natural Law’, in The Languages of Political Theory in Early – Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 99–122; and Istvan Hont, ‘The Language of Sociability and Commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the Theoretical Foundations of the “Four Stages Theory”‘, in The Languages of Political Theory in Early – Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 253–76. For more detail, see footnotes 5–7 to the Introduction, (10–14).
T. J. Hochstrasser, Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 40–71.
For recent attempts to paint Pufendorf as a neo-scholastic moral philosopher, against his own explicit warnings to the contrary, see Thomas Pink, ‘Natural Law and the Theory of Moral Obligation’, in Psychology and Philosophy: Inquiries into the Soul from Late Scholasticism to Contemporary Thought, ed. Sara Heinämaa and Martina Reuter (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), 97–114; Hannah Dawson, ‘Natural Religion: Pufendorf and Locke on the Edge of Freedom and Reason’, in Freedom and the Construction of Europe. Volume 1: Religious Freedom and Civil Liberty, ed. Quentin Skinner and Martin Van Gelderen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 115–33; and Ben Holland, The Moral Person of the State: Pufendorf, Sovereignty and Composite Polities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 65–103.
Heikki Haara, Pufendorf’s Theory of Sociability: Passions, Habits and Social Order (Dordrecht: Springer, 2018), 8–9, 59–98.
The modern Latin edition is Samuel Pufendorf, De officio, ed. Gerald Hartung (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997). For English translations, see Samuel Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law, ed. James Tully, trans. Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Samuel Pufendorf, The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature, ed. Ian Hunter and David Saunders (Indianapolis ind: Liberty Fund, 2003).
Samuel Pufendorf, Dissertatio de statu hominum naturali (1674) in Dissertationes academicae selectiores (Lund, 1675). And English translation: Samuel Pufendorf’s ‘On the Natural State of Men’. The 1678 Latin Edition and English Translation, ed. & trans. M. Seidler (Lewiston, ME: Mellen, 1990).
Fiammetta Palladini, Discussioni seicentesche su Samuel Pufendorf. Scritti Latini: 1663–1700 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1978). The comprehensive annotated bibliography and summaries of the works attacking Pufendorf’s natural law works is at pp. 163–393.
Samuel Pufendorf, Eris Scandica, und andere polemische Schriften über das Naturrecht, ed. Fiammetta Palladini (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002), vii–xvii.
See, Pufendorf, Eris Scandica, 64.
Ibid., 126–27.
Fiammetta Palladini, Die Berliner Hugenotten und der Fall Barbeyrac: Orthodoxe und ‘Sozinianer’ im Refuge (1685–1720) (Leiden: Brill, 2011).
See notes 12–14 above.
See, Fiammetta Palladini, La Biblioteca di Samuel Pufendorf (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999).
For Barbeyrac’s note, see Samuel Pufendorf, The Law of Nature and Nations: Or, A General System of Morality, Jurisprudence, and Politics in Eight Books, trans. Basil Kennet, 5th 1749 ed. (London: 1717), ii.2.3, note 2, p. 106.