Uploaded March 2016 | Updated September 2026, 5 hours ago
On Monday February 29 at 7.30 p.m., Arild Saether, professor emeritus in economics, Agder Academy of Sciences and Letters, Kristiansand, Norway, held a talk entitled "Samuel Pufendorf – The Grandfather of Modern Political Economy?" This evening event was organized by faculty member Dirk Ehnts.
Samuel Freiherr von Pufendorf (1632–1694) was almost as unknown during most of the 19th and 20th centuries as he had been familiar during the preceding hundred years and more. Pufendorf's thought is situated in post-Westphalian Europe, as the Holy Roman Empire underwent a reconfiguration of power relationships among its quasi-autonomous constituent states (Austria, Bavaria, Palatinate, Saxony, Brandenburg, and others), while maintaining a guarded posture toward external, competing powers such as France, England, the United Provinces, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, and Spain. Its main goals were to avoid relapse into confessional warfare, and to ward off the respective French and Ottoman threats on its western and eastern borders. In this context Pufendorf developed a theory about the moral relationships of agents (individuals and groups), the authority and duties of states, and the lawful interactions among these. His chief objective, too, was to avoid destructive social conflict and the devolution on any level into the antagonistic and, he thought, self-defeating condition known as the state of nature.
On Monday February 29 at 7.30 p.m., Arild Saether, professor emeritus in economics, Agder Academy of Sciences and Letters, Kristiansand, Norway, held a talk entitled "Samuel Pufendorf – The Grandfather of Modern Political Economy?" This evening event was organized by faculty member Dirk Ehnts.
Samuel Freiherr von Pufendorf (1632–1694) was almost as unknown during most of the 19th and 20th centuries as he had been familiar during the preceding hundred years and more. Pufendorf's thought is situated in post-Westphalian Europe, as the Holy Roman Empire underwent a reconfiguration of power relationships among its quasi-autonomous constituent states (Austria, Bavaria, Palatinate, Saxony, Brandenburg, and others), while maintaining a guarded posture toward external, competing powers such as France, England, the United Provinces, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, and Spain. Its main goals were to avoid relapse into confessional warfare, and to ward off the respective French and Ottoman threats on its western and eastern borders. In this context Pufendorf developed a theory about the moral relationships of agents (individuals and groups), the authority and duties of states, and the lawful interactions among these. His chief objective, too, was to avoid destructive social conflict and the devolution on any level into the antagonistic and, he thought, self-defeating condition known as the state of nature.
