Abstract

This dissertation centers on the major works of the seventeenth-century political theorist, Samuel Pufendorf, and the dialogue which he undertook in those works with Thomas Hobbes and Hugo Grotius. In the same century that Hobbes accomplished a transformation in natural law thinking, replacing the idiom of natural law with the idiom of natural rights, Pufendorf achieved a corresponding transformation within the concept of natural law itself, changing it from an ontological to a deontological precept. It was in the course of this dialogue with Hobbes and Grotius that Pufendorf effected this shift. ;The spur to Pufendorf's enquiry was his observation that the covenant by which Hobbes instituted the sovereign did not bind. Although Hobbes was still writing in the idiom of natural law, he was the first political theorist to render a thoroughly secular and positivist conception of the state. If Hobbes would have the state as a human invention, however, human beings must be capable of acts of social and political construction. For Pufendorf this required a theory of obligation applicable to a secular agency. ;Pufendorf was also in dialogue with Hugo Grotius, who had, prior to the advent of Hobbes, begun the task of freeing the concept of natural law from the Aristotelian ontology. Pufendorf turned to Grotius to discover a thesis which, while not restoring the ontology to the tradition, would circumvent the implications drawn by Hobbes from the idea of a secular agency. Grotius's brilliantly suggestive arguments did not give rise to a set of premises under which the individual could be obligated, however. It remained for Pufendorf to devise a theory of obligation applicable to human beings conceived as free in nature. ;The dissertation consists of four chapters. The first relocates Hobbes in the natural law tradition and shows the implications of his thesis for the Grotian innovations. Three chapters centering on Pufendorf's thesis follow, the first treating natural obligation, the second, promissory obligation, and the third, political obligation