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Samuel Pufendorf (1632 - 1694)

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I mentioned Pufendorf here recently, very much in passing.

But hey, why not devote a brief post to him? He does tend to get lost in quickie surveys of the Enlightenment figures, although he usually does show up in those lists.

Here is a link to a discussion of some of his key views in Stanford's invaluable encyclopedia of philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pufendorf-moral/

Pufendorf's overriding project was to set natural law theory on a firm foundation. His presumption was that theology and exegesis was NOT a firm foundation, but a slippery sand of contending sects and state-sponsored devils quoting scripture for their own purposes.  He wanted to start again with moral and political philosophy in much the way that Descartes recently had with metaphysics and epistemology.

The equivalent of "I think," then ... in this writing? Consideration of what life would be like in a state of nature. Yes, Pufendorf -- a contemporary of John Locke -- had obvious antecedents here, Hobbes the most obvious of all -- but his contemplation of the state of nature (actually at least three different states of nature figure in his writings)  involves some original features, and (as I mentioned two days ago) this is what helped inform the better-remembered views of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Pufendorf asks us to consider at least three different states of nature: the condition we would be in without language, families, households, etc. (civil society in short); the condition we'd be in if we had ONLY civil society and no  political structure; and finally the condition we ARE in, in a world where various often hostile national sovereigns face each other essentially without mediating institutions.

This amount to an argument for an international law of war and peace as the next natural step in human progress, the overcoming of the third and still-regnant state of nature.

Rousseau is remembered for his relatively benign view of his own "state of nature," an era before science and the arts messed us up. That isn't Pufendorfian.Still, Rousseau did believe that we need a social contract now that we ARE messed up, and his take on the one we need does have some Pufendorfianism in it.
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