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This chapter suggests that a nuanced account of early Enlightenment natural law theory may have something to offer modern debates that swing between a liberal emphasis on individual rights and a communitarian emphasis upon group rights. An examination of Pufendorf's work reveals that his natural law theory embraces two connected ways of thinking about toleration. One the one hand, his theory underpins the power of the magistrate to tolerate pragmatically for reasons of state. On the other, his account of natural religion defines a sphere that cannot be invaded legitimately by the state. Pufendorf's distinction between churches (as voluntary associations) and states (as guarantors of individual rights) offers resources for rethinking contemporary discussions that struggle to balance claims by religious communities to maintain their identities with the claims of their vulnerable members not to be oppressed.

This chapter examines the German jurist and philosopher Samuel Pufendorf as a theorist of religious intolerance. Usually, Pufendorf is associated with the defence of some degree of religious toleration. He was a strong critic of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV, and it is often argued that Pufendorf intended to deconfessionalize politics by using his natural law theory to separate secular affairs of state from theological controversies over revealed religion. At the same time, however, Pufendorf has seemed a very inconsistent advocate of religious toleration, one who, on occasion, was willing to endorse religious intolerance. The chapter shows that Pufendorf's views are not as inconsistent as they might appear to be. He did not intend to deconfessionalize politics. He was not a principled defender of religious toleration. And the importance of his theory of natural law for his ideas on religious toleration is actually very limited.

Jean Barbeyrac is a seminal figure in the history of natural law doctrine and one who, as a Huguenot refugee, had much to say on the topic of toleration. For Barbeyrac, natural law offered a secular rationalist principle of morality that could be used in the battle against Catholic persecution. Barbeyrac took from his seventeenth-century predecessors the natural law idea that the state was an essentially secular body and used that idea to license a much more thoroughgoing form of toleration. If the state had no religious competence then even atheism could be permitted, because it did not constitute an injury to the civil peace. This chapter shows that Barbeyrac's radical account of natural law and toleration made substantial modifications to the arguments of his predecessors, and in doing so moved natural law beyond the theological constraints that structured the defining work in the genre.

Public law emerges as an autonomous field of knowledge in the period between the mid-16th and late 17th centuries. This was a critical period of intense religious conflict in which the character of collective human association was placed in question. The period, marked by the historicization, rationalization, and secularization of political thought, led to the severing of political order from its religious origins and a shift in focus from the sovereign towards the state. The corporate idea of the state became the ground on which an autonomous concept of public law could be built. This chapter explains this transition by reference first to a methodological shift that leads to the promotion of public law as a type of historico-political discourse; secondly to the growth of absolutist thought and the idea of sovereignty; and then to a revolution in natural law thinking leading to the emergence of modern natural right. Sovereignty and right combine to provide the rudiments of the concept of public law.

This chapter examines Grotius’s important influence on Selden as well as their mutual influence on Milton. No history of early modern religious toleration is complete without reference to Grotius’s De Jure Belli ac Pacis and Selden’s De Jure Naturali et Gentium. The implicitly Judaeophilic context of most of their rabbinic references affected not only Milton, but even Grotius’s skeptical editor Jean Barbeyrac as well as the later theorist Samuel Pufendorf. In a tour de force, Selden invents an authentic midrash on Job 31, proving with the help of rabbinic sources, that Job was a righteous Gentile who kept the Noachide laws.

This chapter suggests that Samuel Pufendorf is the real anomaly in the modern natural rights tradition, for he is the only writer generally associated with the tradition who asserts anything like a rich theory of human natural sociability. It provides accounts of Pufendorf as a critic of Grotius based on the ideas of sociability, property, and international punishment. Moreover, Pufendorf's refutation of Hobbes's concept of the state of nature became the central part of his enterprise, which also undermined Hobbes's political theory.

For Pufendorf, the rejection of Hobbes's theoretical foundations accompanied a rejection of many of the practical implications of Hobbes's theory, and a rejection of the ideas about making war which Hobbes shared with Grotius and with the humanist tradition. For some writers, their hostility to the practical implications of Pufendorf's theory was so great that they were willing to flirt with Hobbes's ideas. This chapter argues that even Locke and Vattel are more like Grotius and Hobbes, in the extent to which they minimize natural sociability. The consequence, however, was very often a considerable confusion or lack of clarity in what they were arguing.

The topic of virtue was not neglected in modern moral philosophy, as some commentators think. But modern philosophers understood virtue in an un-Aristotelian manner, as the habit of obeying the law — the moral or natural law. This seems to allow no room for the insight of the virtuous agent. But natural law theorists worked with a distinction, derived from Grotius and Pufendorf, between perfect and imperfect duties. The latter cannot be laid out precisely. They call for a character committed to general benevolence and family good. Thus, modern virtue theory has a counterpart to the Aristotelian discretion allowed to the virtuous agent. Hume's distinction between natural and artificial virtues reworks the distinction between imperfect and perfect duties, leaving out reference to natural law. And Kant adopts that distinction, giving it his own reading. Neglect was not the modern misfortune of virtue; perhaps modern versions of virtue theory were.

Divine command theory, or voluntarism, in ethics occupied a major place in early modern debates in moral philosophy. Propounded by the outrageous Hobbes and by Pufendorf's widely admired works on natural law, it aroused fierce opposition as well as extensive support. Because God has no superior, he can have, on the voluntarist view, no obligations. Critics objected that this makes God into a tyrant whom it is impossible to love. To defeat voluntarist moral philosophy critics had to show how morality could be seen to rest on self-evident and necessary principles that no rational being, including God, could reject. The principles had to be capable of settling every moral question — otherwise God's untrammeled will would find an opening. And everyone — God included — must be motivated to comply freely with morality's directives. Rationalists and empiricists alike came up with theories meeting these requirements: consequentialist and intuitionist theories emerged out of the debates about them. Kant combined radically free will with rationally necessary moral principle to provide a foundation for ethics that took elements from both the voluntarists and their opponents.

Written for those beginning the study of Kant's ethics, this chapter briefly explains Kant's importance in moral philosophy. His originality is brought out by comparisons with Aquinas, Luther, Pufendorf, Wolff, and Hume. His significance in contemporary ethics is indicated here by comparing his theory with intuitional and utilitarian views. His influence on Rawls' views is also indicated in this chapter.

Commenting on the Fourth Proposition in Kant's ‘Idea for a Universal History’, this chapter discusses earlier ideas of sociability to bring out the originality of Kant's notion of ‘unsocial sociability’. The Epicureans, the Stoics, Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, Mandeville, Hutcheson, and Rousseau are among those mentioned. Kant sees our unsocial sociability as a spur to individual and social improvement. What makes sociability so difficult for us, Kant thinks, is the radical evil in the human will, which perversely leads us to freely choose what we ought to avoid.

Pufendorf is now largely ignored by moral philosophers but his influence on the subject was enormous. He took up the Grotian problem of reshaping morality for a Europe deeply divided by religious differences. Trying to keep God involved in morality while minimizing his active role, he produced a system of voluntarist ethics. Obligation comes from the command of a superior; God has no superior, hence no obligations; our obligations can be discovered empirically by using special features of our God-given nature as pointers to God's will. Our quarrelsome but social nature is our central characteristic. So the first law of nature is ‘Increase sociability’. All the other laws follow from that. Pufendorf worked out a huge system of norms covering morality, politics, and international affairs. His work was read throughout Europe and in America.

This chapter begins with an examination of those seventeenth-century contributions prior to Locke that cannot be classed as either scholastic or Cartesian, such as those by Spinoza and the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth. Contrary to some recent commentary, although Spinoza makes use of the notion of consciousness in his account of the human mind, it remains unclear what kind of relationship consciousness has to one's own mental states in his theory. Cudworth, by contrast, has a fairly detailed account of consciousness and of other forms of self-relating, drawing heavily on neo-Platonic sources. Further, the chapter outlines the seventeenth century transition from ontological to more subjectivist accounts of identity, in thinkers as diverse as Clauberg, Hobbes and Boyle, and connects this with a shift towards an increased focus on the issue of diachronic identity rather than individuation. Lastly, moral and theological issues related to the concept of a person are examined. Here, the distinction between man and person in Hobbes and Pufendorf, and especially the latter's account of the person as a non-substantial moral entity, are explained and their important influence on subsequent thought highlighted. The notion of moral responsibility is linked to that of the afterlife and thereby to the doctrines of the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body. The chapter examines different accounts of these doctrines, including materialist ones, such as that of William Coward, and how they relate to the issue of personal identity.

This chapter turns to Locke's account of personal identity itself, taking up the discussion of the fundamental notions that are relevant in this account from the previous chapter. Contrary to what some commentators hold, Locke distinguishes between consciousness and memory, and he ascribes to both an essential role in the constitution of personal identity. Linked to the notion of consciousness is that of self-concern: its main function for personal identity is that through it the subject relates to its own future; it also connects cognitive features (consciousness and memory) with the moral and legal features of personal identity. In this context the question of the ontological status of Lockean persons re-emerges (chapter 3). Readings that take Lockean persons to be substances are mistaken: Rather, Locke, following Pufendorf, allows that we talk of persons in analogy to substances, as if they were substances, but they are essentially, as in Pufendorf, modal entities. The chapter next examines the theological aspects of Locke's account of personal identity and its connection with Locke's view of the doctrine of original sin and the resurrection, including the controversy with Stillingfleet. A question is raised of whether Locke's account is compatible with genuine repentance. The theological aspects are connected to the thinking matter issue. Locke's materialist followers, Collins, Voltaire, Cuenz see a constructive role for a Lockean account of personal identity within a materialist metaphysics. Although Locke does not endorse materialism, his own theory would in principle fit as well into a materialist as into an immaterialist theory of the mind

In this essay it is argued that Suárez fundamentally altered the traditional conception of obligation and laid the groundwork for the modern one. According to Suárez the obligatoriness of the moral law does not lie in the power of the law-giver as judge and punisher but rather lies in the rationality of the directives of the moral law itself. It is argued that this is best understood as a distinctive kind of justificatory force within practical reason that is inherent to an action, ‘the force of Demand.’ It is this special force that grounds praise and blame. The reception of this model of obligatoriness is traced among seventeenth-century natural law theorists—Grotius, Pufendorf and Locke—and it is argued that although Grotius and Pufendorf accepted Suárez’s account Locke reverted to the traditional conception.

Against the traditional view that the Reich declined after the Peace of Westphalia, this section argues that Ferdinand III and Leopold I forged a viable synthesis of German monarchy and German liberty. They were aided by a general desire for peace and by the need to defend the Reich repeatedly against France and the Turks. The Reichstag again became the central decision forum for negotiation between emperor and princes. Leopold I shrewdly exploited his position as overlord and supreme judge and the court at Vienna became a central vehicle of imperial authority. Leopold's reaffirmation of the crown's special relationship with the church (Reichskirche) and the cities further strengthened his position. He inspired plans for the economic regeneration of the Reich (J.J. Becher) and for academies of arts and sciences (Leibniz), schemes for religious reconciliation (Spinola, Molanus, Leibniz) and new writing about the nature of the Reich (Conring, Hugo, Pufendorf, Leibniz).