Samuel von Pufendorf

Samuel Freiherr von Pufendorf (1632 to 1694) was a German natural law theorist and political thinker, born in Dorfchemnitz in Saxony during the Thirty Years War. He studied under the polymath Erhard Weigel, who introduced him to Galileo, Grotius, Descartes and Hobbes, and he later held a professorship in philology and the law of nations at Heidelberg. His thought belongs to post-Westphalian Europe and the reshaped Holy Roman Empire. Building on Bodin, Lipsius, Grotius and Hobbes rather than on scholastic or religious authority, he developed a modern, Protestant natural law that is anti-authoritarian and secular in method. He is known as a voluntarist in ethics, a sovereignty theorist in politics and a realist in international relations theory, and was almost forgotten for much of the 19th and 20th centuries.