Bo Lindberg Pufendorf was also indirectly criticised for his opinion that the knowledge of natural law is based upon human nature as it exists here and now, with all its wickedness and imperfections, i.e. the nature of man as it is after the Fall, in statu corrupto. This was a point where the German opponents of Pufendorf had attacked him vehemently, claiming man’s perfect nature in Paradise, in statu integro, as the starting point for the investigation of natural law. Swedish writers on the subject do not side with the orthodox theologians, for that would have meant that ius naturae became a theological matter reguiring the help of Revelation to be treated, and no one philosopher or jurist wanted that. (Also, I think it would have been a “crimen laesi Pufendorfii”). But they did not follow Pufendorf either; evidently the principle of man’s nature in statu corrupto smacked of Hobbesianism. So, adopting Schefferus’ opinion, they chose a compromise, namely man’s nature considered abstractly, without regard to either status corruptus or status integer but with regard to its perfection. This was a teleological principle, but it was not based upon Revelation and theology. It was a fruit of Schefferus’ Aristotelian dependence, but also a tactical compromise in an environment where pedagogical and ideological considerations mattered more than the intellectual and scientific attitude. Thus, Pufendorf’s philosophical foundation of his theory was subject to certain modification. The same thing happened to his political theory. The theory of contract, according to which the individuals in the state of nature—or, to be exact, the patresfamilias of each household—gave up their original freedom and equality in a set of contracts and handed over their power over themselves to a sovereign, could become a delicate matter in certain political conditions. Normally, however, it was interpreted in an authoritarian manner, stressing the obligation of the subjects to the king. During the 1680s, Swedish absolutismwas described in this way at Uppsala. But the Caroline regime was hypersensitive to anything that could possibly weaken its authority, and the contract theory was suppressed in the early 1690s and handled with caution thereafter; it was replaced by theocratic wordings about the immediately divine origin of royal power and the idea, derived fromAristotle, that the state is ordained directly by nature, without human intervention and contract. This in turn provoked opposition among some academics who, in a scandalous disputation in 1691, proposed a liberal interpretation of the contract theory, arguing that no one could be the superior of another without a preceding contract and that it would be contrary to natural equality, if subordination was ordained directly by nature. There are other instances of a similar interpretation of the contract theory during the era of absolutism, and it seems to have played a certain, if marginal, role in the legitimation of the revolution in 1719, which ended 78
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=