The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature. Samuel Pufendorf

      In 1691, eighteen years after its original publication, Samuel Pufendorf’s De officio hominis et civis appeared in English translation in London, bearing the title The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature. This translation, by Andrew Tooke (1673–1732), professor of geometry at Gresham College, passed largely unaltered through two subsequent editions, in 1698 and 1705, before significant revision and augmentation in the fourth edition of 1716. Unchanged, this text was then reissued as the fifth and final edition of 1735, which is here republished for the first time since.¹ Five editions, spanning almost half a century, bear testimony to the English appetite for Pufendorf’s ideas.

      There are important regards, however, in which The Whole Duty of Man differs from Pufendorf’s De officio.² In the first place, Tooke’s translation is the product and instrument of a shift in political milieu—from German absolutism to English parliamentarianism—reflected in the translator’s avoidance of Pufendorf’s key political terms, in particular “state” (civitas) and “sovereignty” (summum imperium). Second, the anonymous editors of the 1716/35 edition intensified Tooke’s anglicization of Pufendorf through the inclusion of material—a series of important footnotes, revised translations of key passages—taken from the first edition of Jean Barbeyrac’s 1707 French translation of the De officio.³ Especially in his footnotes, Barbeyrac had moderated the secular and statist dimensions of Pufendorf’s thought in order to retain some continuity between civil duties and religious morality—enough at least to remind citizens of a law higher than the civil law and to remind the sovereign power of its responsibility to protect the natural rights of citizens. Those reminders, though suited to the “polite” post-Hobbesian world of early-eighteenth-century London, had not been at all germane to Pufendorf’s original intention and text.

      In the 1735 edition of The Whole Duty of Man, Pufendorf’s thought has thus been successively reshaped in the course of its reception into a series of specific cultural and political milieux. To approach this text from the right angle we must follow a similar path. We thus begin with Pufendorf himself, and then discuss Barbeyrac’s engagement with Pufendorf, before entering the English world of Andrew Tooke and the anonymous editors who, in 1716, introduced the fruits of Barbeyrac’s engagement into Tooke’s translation.

      The son of a Lutheran pastor, Samuel Pufendorf was born in the Saxon village of Dorfchemnitz in 1632, moving to the neighboring town of Flöha the following year.⁴ This was the middle of the Thirty Years’ War, whose horrors and fears Pufendorf experienced as a child, with killings in nearby villages and the family forced to flee its home briefly when he was seven. The Peace of Westphalia came about only in 1648, when Pufendorf was approaching maturity. The experience of religious civil war and the achievement of social peace remained a driving factor in Pufendorf’s lifelong concern with the governance of multiconfessional societies, and hence with the critical relation between state and church.⁵

      Pufendorf began to acquire the intellectual and linguistic equipment with which he would address these issues as a scholarship boy at the Prince’s School (Fürstenschule) in Grimma (1645–50). The Saxon Prince’s Schools were Protestant grammar schools in which boys, destined to become clergy and officials, learned Latin and Greek, thereby gaining access to the classical texts so crucial to the development of early modern civil philosophy. Pufendorf continued his education at the universities of Leipzig and Jena (1650–58). At Leipzig his thoughts of a clerical career soon evaporated, the result of his exposure to Lutheran orthodoxy in its uncompromising Protestant-scholastic form. Fueled by hostility to the mixing of philosophy and theology in university metaphysics, he turned to law and politics at Jena, aided by the teachings of Erhard Weigel, through whom Pufendorf encountered the “moderns”—Descartes, Grotius, and Hobbes. When Pufendorf began to formulate his moral and political philosophy, it was Grotius and Hobbes who provided his initial orientation toward a postscholastic form of natural law.

      After a brief period as house-tutor to the Swedish ambassador to Denmark (1658–59)—during which he was imprisoned as a result of the war between the Scandinavian neighbors—Pufendorf spent a short interlude in Holland before gaining appointment as professor of natural and international law at the University of Heidelberg (1661–68). From there he moved to a similar professorship at the University of Lund in Sweden, where he remained from 1668 to 1676. During this time, he wrote his monumental treatise on natural law—the De jure naturae et gentium, or Law of Nature and Nations (1672)—followed a year later 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