Bo Lindberg The doctrine of natural law was a cherished academic subject in Sweden. From 1655 there were regular lectures at Uppsala on Grotius’ De jure belli ac pads, and in 1665, Johannes Schefferus, the most prominent of Swedish humanist scholars in those days, was appointed professor of the law of nature and nations. And three years later, in 1668, Pufendorf was summoned to the newly-founded university of Lund as professor juris naturae et gentium. From the middle of the 1670s topics of natural law were treated in the dissertations and they became very frequent as the years passed. Probably, the academic study of natural law was pursued with more energy in Sweden than anywhere else in the 17th century. The most influential theorist was Pufendorf, whose doctrine penetrated the teaching of natural lawfrom the middle of the 1670s. The great quarrel he had had at Lund did not diminish his reputation; no Swedish scholars were involved in the anti-Pufendorf campaign, which was an internal affair of the German learned republic, although it happened to take place on Swedish territory. Contemporary Swedish university professors always quote him with great respect in their writings, even when they do not share his opinions. There were, however, other theorists too, first of all Grotius, who dominated the stage in the 1660s and the early 1670s; further English doctors of the lawof nature like Robert Sharrock, John Selden and Richard Cumberland—Locke’s influence cannot be noticed until the 1720s—and German scholars like Samuel Rachelius, Joachim Zentgraf and, at the beginning of the 18th century, Christian Thomasius. But more influential than all these— with the exception of Pufendorf—was the above-mentioned Johannes Schefferus, who can be regarded as a domestic Swedish teacher of natural law although he was a German immigrant. In his extensive but handwritten Sciagraphia juris naturae, which was copied and frequently used in the lectures long after his death in 1679, he compiled a system of his own, which is marked by Schefferus’ Aristotelian inclinations and thus has a conservative character. For instance, he is reluctant to accept the idea of natural equality in the state of nature, arguing that the relations of subordination between wife and husband, slave and master etc. are created and recommended by nature; he admits that there is a contract between the persons involved, but such a contract only designs and puts into effect what nature has already ordained. Also, he criticizes Grotius for his opinion that there was no private property in the original state of Paradise. Why, then, was natural law such a fostered subject at the Swedish universities? There are, at least, three important functions of the doctrine of natural law to be discerned in the sources. First, the doctrine plays a part in the 72
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