Pufendorf and 18th-century Scottish Philosophy* By Dr. Thomas Mautner, The Australian National University, Canberra I “Jamais Livre n’eut une approbation plus universelle”, Barbeyrac wrote,* and, according to Dugald Stewart, it was “a work which was first published a year before Bacon’s death, and which continued, for a hundred and fifty years afterwards to be regarded in all the Protestant universities of Europe, as an inexhaustible treasure of moral and jurisprudential wisdom”.- The book in question was Grotius’s De iure belli ac pads. Together with Pufendorf’s works of 1672 and 1673, it was the basis for the tradition of natural jurisprudence or, as it may also be called, modern natural law theory. As for the impact of this tradition in the British Isles, Stewart wrote; “In Scotland, the impression produced by the writings of Grotius and Pufendorf was more peculiarly remarkable [than elsewhere in Britain]. They were everywhere accepted as the best manuals of ethical and political instruction that could be put into the hands of students and gradually contributed to form that memorable school from whence so many philosophers and philosophical historians were afterwards to proceed.”^ The influence was not only on certain individual eminent writers, like Stair, or Locke, whose explicit inclusion of Pufendorf together with Aristotle and Cicero in his shortlist of authors recommended as essential for the education of a This paper is a preliminary exploration based on research commenced when holding a fellowship, most gratefully acknowledged, at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, in autumn 1981. ^ Preface p. cxvi, in Barbeyrac. - Stewart p. 71. ® Stewart p. 93.
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