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

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.