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Two Books of the Elements of Universal Jurisprudence was Pufendorf’s first work, published in 1660. Its appearance effectively inaugurated the modern natural-law movement in the German-speaking world. The work also established Pufendorf as a key figure and laid the foundations for his major works, which were to sweep across Europe and North America.
Elements of Universal Jurisprudence established Pufendorf’s political theory, which, when fully developed, became the most significant alternative to rights-based theories. Pufendorf rejected the concept of natural rights as liberties and the suggestion that political government is justified by its protection of such rights, arguing instead for a principled limit to the state’s role in human life. The Liberty Fund edition is based on the translation by William Abbott Oldfather prepared for the Classics of International Law series published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"Right is an active moral power, belonging to a person, to receive something from another as a matter of necessity.

1. In addition to those meanings by which the word right (jus) is used for law, and for a complex or system of homogeneous laws, as also for a judicial sentence, or the sentence of laws applied to deeds, for example, when we say that the praetor renders judgement (jus), or the jurisconsult answers on a point of law (jus), the most frequent use is to employ it for that moral quality by which we properly either command persons, or possess things, or by which things are owed to us. Thus, under the name of right comes commonly authority over persons as well as over things which are our own or another’s; and that authority which regards things is in a special sense called “the right in the thing.” Concerning these words, however, this discrimination seems to be observed, namely, that authority rather suggests the actual presence of the aforesaid quality over things or persons, but more obscurely connotes, and leaves almost undecided, the manner in which one has acquired it; while right properly and clearly indicates that the quality has been acquired properly and is now also properly held. But because a number of species of the above-mentioned quality rejoice in special designations, which that quality, whereby something is owed us, lacks, we have preferred to mark this quality here in a peculiar way with the designation of right (jus), under the proviso, however, that we do not at all wish to be bound to accept this word always within these narrow limits."

Samuel Pufendorf

Baron Samuel von Pufendorf  (1632-694) was a German jurist, political philosopher, economist, statesman, and historian. Born in Saxony in 1632, the son of a Lutheran clergyman, he studied at Leipzig and Jena and held the first modern professorship in natural law, at the University of Heidelberg. Pufendorf was successively professor of natural law at Lund in Sweden and Swedish historiographer royal. He ended his career as Prussian court historian and died in Berlin in 1694. In addition to fundamental works in Protestant natural law, much admired by Locke, Pufendorf contributed importantly to German constitutional theory and wrote major historical works.

Samuel Pufendorf was one of the most important figures in early-modern political thought. An exact contemporary of Locke and Spinoza, he transformed the natural law theories of Grotius and Hobbes, developed striking ideas of toleration and of the relationship between church and state, and wrote extensive political histories and analyses of the constitution of the German empire.