Pufendorf and the Natural Law Tradition

Samuel von Pufendorf (1632–1694) was born in Dorfchemnitz, in the Electorate of Saxony, the son of a Lutheran pastor, and studied theology and then law and philosophy at Leipzig and Jena before an unlikely episode launched his intellectual career: in 1658, while serving as tutor to the son of the Swedish envoy in Copenhagen, he was imprisoned for roughly eight months when war broke out between Sweden and Denmark, and it was during this confinement, reportedly working largely from memory, that he composed the manuscript that became his Elementa Jurisprudentiae Universalis (1660). Pufendorf went on to hold, from 1661, the first chair in Europe explicitly dedicated to the law of nature and nations, at Heidelberg, before moving to Lund in Sweden, where he completed his two major works, the comprehensive De Jure Naturae et Gentium Libri Octo (1672) and its condensed textbook version, De Officio Hominis et Civis Juxta Legem Naturalem (1673), the latter becoming, through numerous editions and translations, one of the most widely used university texts in natural law across Protestant Europe and, later, colonial North America, where it was taught, among other places, at Harvard.