Chapter 7
Pufendorf on Commerce and Natural Law
In: The State of Nature: Histories of an IdeaSearch for other papers by David Singh Grewal in
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Abstract
The theoretical foundations of classical political economy often seem obscure. This paper argues that political economy derived from the social contract tradition, specifically, from considerations of “man” in his natural state. The key figure in this connection was Samuel Pufendorf, whose reconceptualization of the “state of natural liberty” as a “state of economy” provided a bridge between seventeenth-century iusnaturalism and eighteenth-century political economy. The result was a new understanding of the “oeconomic,” opposed to both the Aristotelian conception of the oikos – since that was founded on natural hierarchy and a quasi-objective account of the good – and Hobbes’s effort to politicize all social relations. This newly conceived “oeconomic” was a domain of non-political “society” based on private property relations and sub-political voluntary associations of a primarily commercial variety, produced through individual consent and corresponding to the demands of (divinely ordained) social progress. Of particular note is Pufendorf’s extensive use of Roman private law in describing the state of nature. Ultimately, what Pufendorf represented as the natural condition of mankind presupposed the property and contract laws of an advanced empire.