Pufendorf

These are my two personal copies of Pufendorf - in Latin:

Photo: Daniel Lee, 2023.

And in French (by Barbeyrac):

Photo: Daniel Lee, 2023.

These are both in very good condition, considering they are both over three centuries old.   

Political theorists now typically remember him for his contributions to international law and the social contract tradition.  But he was so much more.  Pufendorf is a figure of huge importance in the history of Western moral philosophy and economic thought.  He is the most important theorist of law and ethics of the Enlightenment before Kant.  Unfortunately the presentation of his writing was very technical and inaccessible to the lay reader without some specialized knowledge of Roman law.  It's a real shame, though, because it is a very creative work and very satisfying to read how he synthesizes his different sources, from history, literature, philosophy, theology, as well as law.  

I'll have more to say about Pufendorf, as I write more about him in the coming months.  But since I was just talking about the 'Hohfeldian moments' in Grotius, I might make a similar observation in Pufendorf as well.  Grotius anticipates the basic Hohfeldian distinction between liberty-rights and claim-rights in his treatment of jus and jus stricte dictum.  

So does Pufendorf.

Pufendorf, De Jure Naturae et Gentium (Amsterdam, 1698) p. 263, III, 5, §3.

In this passage, Pufendorf refers to Aesop's fable of the horse and the stag (Fable 47) and observes that, while it may be true that the horse had a 'natural right' [= facultas naturalis], a liberty, to graze in the meadow, so too did the stag enjoy a similar right to graze.  Both enjoyed a Hohfeldian 'liberty-right.'  But 'neither had a proper right to graze because natural right enjoyed by each did not affect the other,' by imposing a correlative duty, a jus proprium over the other.  If the horse and stag did indeed have a genuine exclusive right to graze, rather than a simple facultas naturalis, they would each have the capacity to 'hinder' [impedire] the other.  But the enjoyment of a natural right confers no such 'right-to-hinder' anyone else's 'natural-right-to-graze,' a strikingly proto-Hohfeldian statement about the category of the 'no-right' (the correlative of privilege).