public good See COMMON GOOD, PHILOSOPHY OF. ECONOMICS , SOCIAL CHOICE THEOR. Pufendorf, Samuel (1632–94), German historian and theorist of natural law. Pufendorf was influenced by both Grotius and Hobbes. He portrayed people as contentious and quarrelsome, yet as needing one another’s company and assistance. Natural law shows how people can live with one another while pursuing their own conflicting projects. To minimize religious disputes about morals, Pufendorf sought a way of deriving laws of nature from observable facts alone. Yet he thought divine activity essential to morality. He opened his massive Latin treatise On the Law of Nature and of Nations (1672) with a voluntarist account of God’s creation of the essence of mankind: given that we have the nature God gave us, certain laws must be valid for us, but only God’s will determined our nature. As a result, our nature indicates God’s will for us. Hence observable facts about ourselves show us what laws God commands us to obey. Because we so obviously need one another’s assistance, the first law is to increase our sociability, i.e. our willingness to live together. All other laws indicate acts that would bring about this end. In the course of expounding the laws he thought important for the development of social life to the high cultural level our complex nature points us toward, Pufendorf analyzed all the main points that a full legal system must cover. He presented the rudiments of laws of marriage, property, inheritance, contract, and international relations in both war and peace. He also developed the Grotian theory of personal rights, asserting for the first time that rights are pointless unless for each right there are correlative duties binding on others. Taking obligation as his fundamental concept, he developed an important distinction between perfect and imperfect duties and rights. And in working out a theory of property he suggested the first outlines of a historical sociology of wealth later developed by Adam Smith. Pufendorf’s works on natural law were textbooks for all of Europe for over a century and were far more widely read than any other treatments of the subject. See also DUTY, GROTIUS , HOBBES, NATURAL LA. J.B.S.
