by the abridgment that he made for university students, the De officio hominis et civis, which in 1691 English readers would come to know as The Whole Duty of Man. Pufendorf completed his career with posts as court historian at the Swedish (1677–88) and then the Brandenburg courts (1688–94). In those years, he wrote major works on the European state system, on the Swedish and Brandenburg crowns, and on the place of religion in civil life.
It is Pufendorf’s natural law works that concern us here. The object of natural law theory is a moral law that is natural in two senses—in being inscribed in man’s nature and in being accessible via natural reason as distinct from divine revelation.6 Furthermore, this moral law is regarded as the normative foundation and universal standard for “positive” law and politics. Building on the Aristotelian conception of man as a “rational and sociable being,” Thomas Aquinas (1224–74) had grounded natural law in a reason shared with God and permitting access to a domain of transcendent values derived from the need to complete or perfect man as a moral being. In subordinating “positive” civil laws to a transcendent moral order, Thomist natural law doctrine armed the Catholic Church against the civil state. In the hands of sixteenth-century scholastics such as Francisco Suárez (1548–1627), this weapon would be used to delegitimate Protestant rulers as heretics, thereby ensuring that their positive laws would not accord with the law of nature in this its scholastic mode.7
In the dark shadows of the religious wars, Protestant thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries sought a natural law that would defend the civil state against religious and moral delegitimation.8 Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) thus viewed the laws derived from sociability as social conventions rather than transcendent values, while the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) made social peace, not moral perfection, the goal of natural law, such that the sovereign state became the final arbiter of morality, not vice versa.9 Following Grotius and Hobbes, Pufendorf too viewed natural law as a set of rules for cultivating the sociability needed to preserve social peace.10 Though he differed from Hobbes by arguing that natural moral law exists in the state of nature—which Hobbes regarded as a state of moral anarchy—Pufendorf agreed with his English counterpart that only a civil government possessing supreme power could provide the security that was the goal of natural law.11 In his Law of Nature and Nations and his De officio (Whole Duty), Pufendorf thus furnished the sovereign state with its own secular legitimacy as an institution created by men to achieve social peace but possessing the absolute right to determine and enforce the measures best suited to this end.
Jean Barbeyrac (1674–1744) was Pufendorf’s most important publicist and commentator. Born into a family of French Calvinists (Huguenots), he too had experienced the dangers of religious civil war, his family having been driven from Catholic France by the renewed religious persecution that followed Louis XIV’s revocation in 1685 of the Edict of Nantes, settling in Berlin in 1697 after some years of refuge mainly in Protestant Lausanne, Switzerland. Whereas the French state had solved the problem of governing a multiconfessional society by imposing religious conformity—in other words, by persecuting and expelling its Protestant population—the Calvinist rulers of Brandenburg-Prussia addressed this problem by permitting limited religious toleration. Berlin thus became a magnet for Protestant refugees, with the result that the exiled Huguenots formed a quarter of the city’s population at the beginning of the eighteenth century. As if echoing Pufendorf’s career, Barbeyrac turned from a clerical future to the study of natural law and moral philosophy. Appointed to a teaching position in Berlin’s French Collège, Barbeyrac commenced what would become his celebrated French translations and commentaries on Pufendorf, aiming to make the latter’s model of a deconfessionalized political order more widely available to a Francophone Huguenot diaspora still fearful for its survival.12 In this context, Barbeyrac translated the De jure in 170613 and the De officio in 1707,14 adding important notes—an apparatus that grew in subsequent editions into a running commentary—and later appending three of his own works to the De officio. These were his famous commentary on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s attack on Pufendorf, the Judgment of an Anonymous Writer, and his twin discourses on the relation of positive and natural law—the Discourse on What Is Permitted by the Laws and the Discourse on the Benefits Conferred by the Laws—composed while he was professor of law in the Academy of Lausanne (1711–17).15 In translating these into English for the first time, and appending them to Tooke’s translation, our aim is to provide Anglophone readers with a simulacrum of the most important of the early modern Pufendorf “reception texts.”
In fact Barbeyrac walks a fine line, defending Pufendorf’s model of a deconfessionalized and pacified legal-political order against its theological and metaphysical critics, yet resiling from the secular and statist dimensions of this model.16 Having suffered at first hand from a religiously unified state, Barbeyrac has little sympathy with a political metaphysics that justified such unity—even a metaphysics as esoteric as Leibniz’s Platonism. Counterattacking Leibniz’s political rationalism, Barbeyrac draws on his translator’s knowledge of the works to defend Pufendorf’s elevation of imposed law over transcendent reason and his insistence that the law apply only to man’s external conduct, leaving his inner morality free—thereby opening the space of religious toleration so crucial to the stateless Huguenots’ survival. On the other hand, given his commitment to the Reformed faith and his Huguenot fear of a religiously hostile absolute state, Barbeyrac grants individual conscience a far greater role in his construction of political authority than does Pufendorf. While claiming to make only minor rectifications to the De officio, Barbeyrac thus introduces major changes to Pufendorf’s foundation of natural law in the need for civil security. In treating natural law as an expression of the divine will to which individuals accede via conscience, Barbeyrac undermines Pufendorf’s argument that only the civil sovereign may give efficacious interpretation to natural law. He thus readmitted Lockean natural rights to a system from which they had been deliberately excluded.
Little is known about the circumstances of Andrew Tooke’s English translation of the De officio or of the anonymous editors of 1716/35, who borrowed footnotes from Barbeyrac’s first edition and used his translation to modify Tooke’s. The obscurity arises from the fact that, unlike other editions and translations of the De officio—for example, the edition prepared by Gershom Carmichael (1672–1729) for his students at Glasgow University17—Tooke’s was not produced in the regulated world of academic publishing but in the altogether more freewheeling milieu of the London commercial book trade. The marks of that milieu are evident in Tooke’s title, which departs significantly from Pufendorf’s original in order to cash in on one of the most popular devotional manuals of the time, Richard Allestree’s The Whole Duty of Man, published in 1658 and rapidly acquiring best-seller status.18 Although exploiting Allestree’s success by borrowing his title, Tooke’s translation was nonetheless a riposte, confronting Allestree’s focus on the religious duties of a Christian subject with Pufendorf’s radical separation of the civil obligations of the citizen from the religious obligations of the Christian.19 We can surmise that Tooke’s 1691 translation of the De officio was undertaken for an audience of London Whigs—including broad-church Anglicans, moderate Puritans, and members of the Inns of Court—as a weapon against persisting high-church aspirations for an Anglican confessional state.20 The future preservation of parliamentary rule and a Protestant peace were not yet guaranteed, nor were the relations of church and state securely settled, so soon after the revolution of 1688–89.
This context also helps explain Tooke’s lexical choices for some of Pufendorf’s key terms. While civitas and summum imperium were capable of several translations in the seventeenth century, depending on the ideological commitments of particular authors, a recent translator shows that in Pufendorf’s case these are most accurately rendered as “state” and “sovereignty,” respectively.21 Indeed, it is central to Pufendorf’s argument that these terms refer to the notion of a supreme political authority irreducible either to those who occupy the office of sovereign or to those over whom such authority is exercised—characteristics definitive of the modern notion of state.22 Given that Hobbes had explicitly introduced both “commonwealth” and
