Samuel von Pufendorf designed a system of universal law while held prisoner in Copenhagen
In 1658 a young Saxon tutor was caught in the middle when Sweden suddenly attacked Denmark mid-negotiation, and he sat in a Danish cell for eight months. With no books, Samuel Pufendorf mentally rebuilt what he had read of Grotius and Hobbes into a system of law for all humanity.
Pufendorf was born in 1632 in Dorfchemnitz, Saxony, the son of a Lutheran pastor, and was meant for the ministry himself. At Leipzig he found the theology narrow and dogmatic and switched to public law. At Jena the mathematician Erhard Weigel befriended him and pointed him toward Grotius, Hobbes and Descartes. He then took a post tutoring the sons of a Swedish envoy in Copenhagen, which is how he ended up imprisoned when war broke out.
Released, he went with his pupils to Leiden and in 1660 published his first treatise on universal jurisprudence. Its dedicatee, the Elector Palatine, created for him at Heidelberg the world's first professorship in the law of nature and nations. He then risked it all with a pseudonymous 1667 pamphlet, posing as a gentleman of Verona, that savaged the structure of the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburgs. It caused a sensation, and after he also criticised a new tax on documents he left for the Swedish university at Lund.
There, in 1672, came his major work on the law of nature and nations. Against Hobbes, he argued that humanity's natural state is peace rather than war, though a fragile peace that needs support. He treated the state as a moral person whose will is the sum of its members' wills, anticipating Rousseau, and insisted that international law binds all nations, not just Christian ones. A later essay distinguishing church authority from state authority helped lay groundwork for religious toleration in Germany.
As royal historiographer in Stockholm and later Berlin he wrote dry, archive-based and strongly pro-Swedish history. Charles XI made him a baron in 1694, the year he died. Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot all recommended him for law students, but Leibniz, after a long feud, sneered that he was barely a jurist and hardly a philosopher at all.
Source: Samuel von Pufendorf
