The Whole Duty Of Man According To The Law Of Nature. Now Made English. Pufendorf, Samuel Von.

First edition in English of this practical abstract of Pufendorf's earlier On the Law of Nature and Nations (1672), originally published in Sweden in 1673. In his 1672 work, Samuel von Pufendorf (1632-1694) outlines "a complete system of law, public, private, and international, based on natural law. the basis of a universal legal science on the basis of natural law" (Walker, p. 1,017). At a time when theorists were working to ground notions of natural law in a hypothetical state of nature, Pufendorf sought "to strike a middle path between the rationalism of Grotius and the voluntarism of Hobbes. He envisaged the state of nature as a war of all against all, from which men would wish to save themselves by joining in a society whose laws were imposed by the ruler's will. But he also argued that such laws must conform to natural law, whose duties he maintained, unlike Grotius, were imposed on man by God's will" (New Palgrave III). In The Whole Duty of Man, Pufendorf extracts material from this earlier study to outline a more focussed study of "one's duties as a human being, acquired by the use of reason, [and] distinguished from knowledge of one's duties as a citizen, as determined by the civil law of one's country" (Brown et al., p. 318). On the Law of Nature and Nations was not published in English until 1703. Provenance: Howard & Linda Knohl, with the 20th-century bookplate of the Fox Pointe Manor library to the front pastedown. Wing P4182. Chris Brown, Terry Nardin, & Nicholas Rengger, International Relations in Political Thought, 2002; David Maxwell Walker, The Oxford Companion to Law, 1980. Octavo (179 x 111 mm). Contemporary mottled calf, spine and covers panelled in blind, raised bands, edges sprinkled red and brown. Bookplate of George Armin Goyder (1908-1997), businessman, author, and Anglican layman, to front free endpaper. Light wear, cosmetic splits to joints and inner hinges, browning to endpapers and edges, occasional minor damp staining to outer margins: a very good copy.