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Introduction, p. ix
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ix introduction In 1691, eighteen years after its original publication, Samuel Pufendorf’s De officio hominis et civis appeared in English translation in London, bearing the title The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature . This translation, by Andrew Tooke (1673–1732), professor of geometry at Gresham College, passed largely unaltered through two subsequent editions, in 1698 and 1705, before significant revision and augmentation in the fourth edition of 1716. Unchanged, this text was then reissued as the fifth and final edition of 1735, which is here republished for the first time since.1 Five editions, spanning almost half a century , bear testimony to the English appetite for Pufendorf’s ideas. There are important regards, however, in which The Whole Duty of Man differs from Pufendorf’s De officio.2 In the first place, Tooke’s translation is the product and instrument of a shift in political milieu— from German absolutism to English parliamentarianism—reflected in the translator’s avoidance of Pufendorf’s key political terms, in particular “state” (civitas) and “sovereignty” (summum imperium). Second, 1. The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature, by that famous civilian Samuel Pufendorf . . . now made English by Andrew Tooke. The fifth edition with the notes of Mr. Barbeyrac, and many other additions and amendments (London: R. Gosling, J. Pemberton, and B. Motte, 1735). 2. The original form of the work may be compared in the new critical edition of the first Latin and German editions. See Samuel Pufendorf, Samuel Pufendorf: De officio, ed. Gerald Hartung, vol. 2, Samuel Pufendorf: Gesammelte Werke (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997). The reader should also consult the most recent and most accurate English translation: Samuel Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law, ed. James Tully, trans. Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). x introduction the anonymous editors of the 1716/35 edition intensified Tooke’s anglicization of Pufendorf through the inclusion of material—a series of important footnotes, revised translations of key passages—taken from the first edition of Jean Barbeyrac’s 1707 French translation of the De officio .3 Especially in his footnotes, Barbeyrac had moderated the secular and statist dimensions of Pufendorf’s thought in order to retain some continuity between civil duties and religious morality—enough at least to remind citizens of a law higher than the civil law and to remind the sovereign power of its responsibility to protect the natural rights of citizens . Those reminders, though suited to the “polite” post-Hobbesian world of early-eighteenth-century London, had not been at all germane to Pufendorf’s original intention and text. In the 1735 edition of The Whole Duty of Man, Pufendorf’s thought has thus been successively reshaped in the course of its reception into a series of specific cultural and political milieux. To approach this text from the right angle we must follow a similar path. We thus begin with Pufendorf himself, and then discuss Barbeyrac’s engagement with Pufendorf , before entering the English world of Andrew Tooke and the anonymous editors who, in 1716, introduced the fruits of Barbeyrac’s engagement into Tooke’s translation. The son of a Lutheran pastor, Samuel Pufendorf was born in the Saxon village of Dorfchemnitz in 1632, moving to the neighboring town of Flöha the following year.4 This was the middle of the Thirty Years’ War, whose horrors and fears Pufendorf experienced as a child, with killings in nearby villages and the family forced to flee its home briefly 3. Jean Barbeyrac, trans., Les devoirs de l’homme et du citoien, tels qu’ils lui sont prescrits par la loi naturelle (Amsterdam: H. Schelte, 1707). 4. For helpful overviews of Pufendorf’s life and work, see James Tully, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Tully, ed., Man & Citizen, xiv–xl; and Michael J. Seidler, “Samuel Pufendorf,” in the Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, ed. Alan Charles Kors (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). There is no standard biography of Pufendorf, but important contributions toward one can be found in Detlef Döring, PufendorfStudien . Beiträge zur Biographie Samuel von Pufendorfs und zu seiner Entwicklung als Historiker und theologischer Schriftsteller (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1992). Also useful is Wolfgang Hunger, Samuel von Pufendorf: Aus dem Leben und Werk eines deutschen Frühaufklärers (Flöha: Druck & Design, 1991). [3.81.79.135] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:03 GMT) introduction xi when he was seven. The...