Bo Lindberg 76 ening him with temporal and eternal torment. Religion is a tie that holds society together, a vinculumhumanae societatis. Topics like these are just practical statements and conclusions that can be found in Pufendorf’s books; they have no indispensible association with the theoretical foundations of natural law. An indeed, they are not new. Ever since the time of Jean Bodin and Justus Lipsius, they had frequently been proposed by the doctors of political prudence. The fresh thing now is that they are put into a coherent system that gives them the rank of scientific truths. The doctrine of natural law is not political prudence, it is a science, whose conclusions are deduced from immutable principles that are inherent in man’s nature, and these conclusions can be proved in the same way as geometrical theorems. There is no need to refer to different authorities—be it Aristotle, Corpus juris civilis or The Ten Commandments—to persuade people of the indispensability of the state, of state authority, of social subordination, private property and so on. As a professor put it in 1702: When teaching about the rights and power of the king, one can support them by quoting Roman Law or Swedish law, “but if you want to explain and prove that it is like that and cannot be otherwise, so that no one can say anything against it'’, than you have to depend on natural law. Although it is only this demonstrability that is explicitly stressed as the decisive advantage of the doctrine, it is justified to assume that its scientific terminology and its association with new scientific methods and ideas contributed to its impressiveness. The statement that you can prove its conclusions is the explicit expression of the experience of the explanatory force of Pufendorfian concepts like state of nature, moral entities {entia ynoralia), natural equality versus civil inequality, contract, obligation and so forth. I want to underline this in order to avoid the conclusion that the doctrine of natural lawin Sweden was nothing but an apologetic instrument in the service of the powers that be. It was also an intellectual novelty, although this is not the conscious and explicit message of the source material I have used. So far, I have dealt with the practical conclusions and recommendations that are drawn out of the doctrine of natural law, not with the theoretical treatment of the subject. There is a rather extensive discussion in the dissertations on theoretical issues in connection with natural law. Partly it deals with the philosophical foundations of the theory—e.g. what is the criterion by which human actions are to be considered honourable or shameful, or “fromwhat principle of knowledge is the investigation of natural law to start?” or the old question whether what is right is right because it is right in itself or because God has willed it so. Partly the discussions
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