 | Of the Nature and Qualification of Religion in Reference to Civil Society Samuel Pufendorf's Of the Nature and Qualification of Religion (published in Latin in 1687) is a major work on the separation of politics and religion. Written in response to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by the French king Louis XIV, Pufendorf contests the right of the sovereign to control the religion of his subjects, because state and religion pursue wholly different ends. He concludes that, when rulers transgress their bounds, subjects have a right to defend their religion, even by the force of arms. Pufendorf's ideas on natural law and toleration were highly influential in both Europe and the British Isles. Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1694) taught natural law and was court historian in both Germany and Sweden. Simone Zurbuchen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon , Barnes and Noble , and iTunes .Born in Dorfchemnitz, Saxony, the son of a Lutheran pastor, Samuel Pufendorf was educated at Leipzig and Jena. At Jena he first read Grotius and Hobbes, and studied under Erhard Weigel. In 1658 he became a tutor in the household of the Swedish ambassador to Denmark; when war erupted between these two countries, he was imprisoned for eight months. It was during this time that Pufendorf wrote his first work in philosophy of law, the brief Universal Elements of Jurisprudence (1660). Subsequently he taught jurisprudence at the University of Heidelberg and the University of Lund (in Sweden); from 1688 onward he lived in Berlin as court historian to the Duke of Brandenburg. Pufendorf produced historical writings, such as his 1667 account of the Holy Roman Empire, as well as treatises on moral and legal philosophy. His greatest work was the On the Law of Nature and Nations (1672). Although Pufendorf is often described (accurately enough) as a natural rights theorist and also as the thinker who first introduced the ideas of Grotius and Hobbes into Germany, his true originality consisted in his view that a society's law and morality are a function of its culture considered as a determinate and living whole. He may thus be regarded as the inventor of the sociological approach to law. As a historian, he anticipated many of the views of nineteenth-century historicism. (Bowker Author Biography) |
