Two Poles of Natural Law in the Formation of the Political Body

Definition

The natural law tradition offers two fundamentally opposed answers to the question of how a political body emerges. The first, exemplified by Hobbes, treats natural law as a pre-political condition of deficiency and conflict that the political body must transcend through a single contractual leap establishing an unlimited sovereign. The second, exemplified by Althusius, treats natural law as the normative foundation from which political order gradually grows through multi-layered association, beginning with the family. These two poles are analytical reconstructions of a broader contrast rather than an exhaustive classification of the tradition. This entry examines the structural tension between them through the case of Pufendorf, who departs from Hobbes by grounding natural law in sociability and granting priority to horizontal association, but ultimately returns to absolute sovereignty. His unfinished departure reveals the difficulty of sustaining the pole of generation, once political unity is identified with an absolute adjudicative center. This entry argues that the historical marginalization of the pole of generation stems from a centralization presupposition within the natural law tradition, the post-1648 consolidation of the sovereign state system, and the historiographical exclusion of the scholastic inheritance. This tension does not disappear when the vocabulary of natural law gives way to later theories of political order.

1. Introduction

How does a political body emerge from natural law? This entry examines two contrasting answers that run through early modern natural law theory. The contrast isolates two poles around which different accounts of political order have formed, and it uses them to clarify a structural tension that is often hidden.

The first pole treats natural law as a condition to be left behind. The state of nature is constructed as the opposite of the political body: a pre-political condition of deficiency, conflict, and lack of public standards of judgment. The birth of the political body signifies its negation and transcendence. Through a single social contract, individuals transfer their natural rights to a supreme sovereign, leaping from the natural to the civil condition. Natural law indicates the exit direction, but does not constitute the foundation of political order. Hobbes’s Leviathan is the most systematic early expression of this pole. Once sovereignty is established, natural law withdraws, replaced by the sovereign’s will. As Rommen noted, Hobbes’s argument “amounts at bottom to a denial of the natural law” [1] (p. 73). In this conception, the formation of the political community is not the realization of nature’s purpose, but an artificial remedy for the defects of the natural condition.

The second pole treats natural law as the foundation from which political order grows. The political body is not a rupture with the state of nature, but its extension. Political order does not arise through a single contractual leap. It begins from the family, the most basic natural unit, and is gradually generated through multi-layered association. Natural rights are preserved and transmitted in this process, ultimately constituting the political body’s normative foundation. This pole was systematically elaborated in the early seventeenth century by the political thinker Johannes Althusius. In his Politica, politics is “a concept of living together in mutual benevolence organized politically in a plurality of social organizations” [2] (p. 21). As Brett has shown in her study of early modern natural law discourse, political space was itself constructed through precisely such dynamic processes, challenging the notion of a single contractual rupture as the sole origin [3] (pp. 1–10).

These two poles do not exhaust the natural law tradition. They mark the outer ends of a contrast within it. Thinkers such as Aquinas, Grotius, Locke, and Rousseau occupy positions that combine elements of both or stand at some distance from either. Aquinas binds political order to a hierarchical scheme of law that remains oriented toward a higher end. Grotius begins from human sociability but ultimately preserves a strong conception of sovereign authority. Locke retains natural rights while accepting the basic structure of the sovereign state. Rousseau rejects the loss of natural liberty through contract yet seeks to reconstitute unity through the general will. The present entry focuses on Hobbes and Althusius because they articulate the two poles with uncommon clarity and consistency. Hobbes pushes the first pole to its logical conclusion: the sovereign replaces natural law as the public standard of judgment, and no intermediate association retains independent authority [4] (pp. 114–118). Althusius pushes the second pole to its logical conclusion: political authority is generated upward through consociations that retain their own rights and functions, so that the commonwealth is a community of communities rather than the product of a single contractual rupture [5] (p. 47).

This focus also avoids a weakness in much existing scholarship. As Widow has shown, the term “state of nature” has often been applied retrospectively to heterogeneous notions in sixteenth-century political thought, with the result that genuinely different theoretical positions are flattened into a single narrative [6] (pp. 201–206). By treating the pole of delimitation and the pole of generation as analytical poles rather than as historical schools, this entry avoids that retrospective conflation. Hobbes and Althusius did not exhaust the natural law tradition, but their contrast reveals something about the tradition that a more continuous narrative tends to obscure.

This structural tension carries implications beyond early modern intellectual history. As Bretherton puts it, the difference between the two poles is ultimately the difference between political life as “a post-Fall development” or as “an original part of creation.” The former makes politics “a symptom of the introduction of sin into creation,” and the latter makes it “a good in itself” [7] (p. 321). A structurally parallel question concerns the status of nature itself: is it an object that morality must restrain, or a source of normativity? Haakonssen’s study of the natural law tradition shows that this tension is central to the transition from Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment. In this period, the relationship between natural law and moral philosophy became increasingly contested [8] (p. 2–11). Dawson locates the same tension within Pufendorf, who primarily treats morality as an external constraint on nature, but sometimes suggests that nature may guide us toward virtue. As Dawson describes it, Pufendorf “beat[s] back across [his] own clear blue water” [9] (pp. 529, 534). This vacillation, this entry argues, reveals a deep entanglement between the two poles that runs through the natural law tradition itself.

Recent scholarship has examined Hobbes, Althusius, and Pufendorf individually, and has productively explored particular relationships among them, but has not brought them together in a systematic comparison of the two poles just distinguished. On Hobbes, a substantial body of work has debated the extent to which he remains within the natural law tradition or breaks from it. Tierney’s historical reconstruction of the idea of natural rights provides the necessary background, showing how the late medieval and early modern understanding of ius and lex shaped the conceptual framework within which Hobbes operated [10] (chs. 1 & 5). Zagorin, Crosato, Duke, and Hallenbrook have examined different facets of this question: Hobbes’s transformation of the teleological framework, the objective conditions of the state of nature, the tension between his positivistic and natural law commitments, and the limits sovereignty faces from the retained right of nature [11] (pp. 244–245) [12] (p. 206) [13] (p. 626) [14] (pp. 177, 190). Hoye’s analysis of natural justice in Leviathan shows that virtue-related concepts persist within Hobbes’s theory even as the pole of delimitation subordinates them to sovereign command [15] (pp. 187, 193). Carmichael’s account of natural right in society clarifies the tension between the absoluteness of sovereignty and the retained right of self-preservation [16] (pp. 4, 13). Merriam’s early study remains instructive: Hobbes did not deny human sociability outright, but treated it as insufficient as a foundation for political order [17] (pp. 152–155). These studies together indicate that even the most systematic expression of the pole of delimitation contains internal strain.

On Althusius, scholarship since Gierke’s nineteenth-century rediscovery has centered on the question of whether he is best understood as a medieval constitutionalist or a modern federalist [2] (p. 9). Hüglin’s reconstruction of his political theory remains indispensable, establishing him as a theorist of political order built from the bottom up through multi-layered associations [5] (p. 47). Bretherton has identified the theological dimension of this alternative, contrasting Althusius’s understanding of political life as original creation with Hobbes’s post-lapsarian remedy [7] (p. 321). De Benoist, Malan, and Kennedy have explored the federal and consociational dimensions of his symbiotics [18] (pp. 51–55) [19] (pp. 6–13) [20] (pp. 310–312), while Tessarolo’s recent work clarifies Althusius’s conception of societas as a co-operative political framework, positioning him as a genuine alternative to the emerging sovereign state tradition [21] (p. 20). This body of work has established Althusius as a distinctive voice within the early modern landscape. What remains underexplored, however, is the structural contrast between his account of political formation and that of the sovereignty tradition.

Recent scholarship has also begun to develop direct comparisons between Hobbes and Althusius. Hornos contrasts them as representatives of two conflicting traditions, the jurisdictional culture and the rationalist natural law tradition, arguing that their divergent methodologies reveal two distinct ways of constructing the relation between authority and law [22] (pp. 49–52). In a further study, Hornos examines the opposition between Genossenschaft and Herrschaft through Gierke’s interpretation of Hobbes and Althusius, showing that this conceptual pair continues to shape the understanding of the modern Rechtsstaat [23] (pp. 2–6). Hornos also compares how Althusius and Hobbes construct civil order from natural freedom, emphasizing the different place of covenant and authority in their accounts of subjection [24] (pp. 85–92). The present entry builds on this emerging comparative literature, but reframes the comparison around a broader question: how natural law itself is understood to stand in relation to the emergence of the political body.

On Pufendorf, the most important recent development is Palladini’s thesis that his natural law is Hobbesian [25] (p. 50). Palladini demonstrates that Pufendorf’s appeal to sociability may merely reiterate Hobbes’s counsel to seek peace in different language [25] (p. 51). Saastamoinen, while acknowledging the force of this reading, clarifies a crucial distinction: for Pufendorf, natural law derives from a divinely imposed duty to promote sociability that does not depend on individual utility calculations [26] (p. 120). Hunter situates Pufendorf’s civil philosophy in opposition to the metaphysical philosophy of Leibniz and Kant, revealing how his project was shaped by the confessional conflicts of his time [27] (pp. 148–151). Haara further reveals the ambiguity of Pufendorf’s middle ground: he cannot, like Hobbes, reduce the good to individual desire, nor can he, like Aquinas, anchor it in a teleological structure intrinsic to human nature [28] (p. 247), while Dawson identifies a parallel oscillation in his treatment of nature’s normativity [9] (pp. 529, 534). Freire has brought Althusius into comparison with Pufendorf and Leibniz on the question of the Holy Roman Empire, showing how different philosophical assumptions generated divergent classifications of the same political object [29] (pp. 1–4). Ramelet’s analysis of consent and natural law in Pufendorf clarifies the distinctive place of the two agreements in his account of state formation, showing that political consent retains a voluntary dimension even within the framework of natural obligation [30] (pp. 299, 302). These studies have illuminated the internal tensions of Pufendorf’s thought. What has not yet been attempted is to read Pufendorf as a test case for the tension between the two poles distinguished above. Palladini asks whether Pufendorf is Hobbesian. This entry asks a different question: what does Pufendorf’s unfinished departure from Hobbes reveal about the difficulty of sustaining the pole of generation in the face of the demand for political unity?

The core argument is that the divergence between the pole of delimitation and the pole of generation reveals a fundamental question about the status of natural law: whether it is a premise to be overcome, or a foundation from which the political body can grow. The entry proceeds in four steps. First, it examines the pole of delimitation through Hobbes (Section 2), and the pole of generation through Althusius (Section 3). Second, it turns to Pufendorf and his On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law [31] (Section 4), whose unfinished departure from Hobbes is used to test the relation between the two poles. Third, this entry analyzes the reasons for the pole of generation’s marginalization: the centralization presupposition within the natural law tradition, the institutional pressure of the post-1648 sovereign state system, and the historiographical exclusion of the scholastic inheritance (Section 5). Finally, the Conclusion returns to the question of political unity and indicates how the same structural difficulty reappears in later discussions of divided societies and legal pluralism.

2. The Pole of Delimitation: Hobbes on Natural Law as What Must Be Overcome

Hobbes provides the most systematic exposition of the pole of delimitation in Leviathan. He derives the necessary conditions of political order from basic presuppositions about human nature. As Zagorin points out, Hobbes both revolutionized and destabilized the natural law tradition, stripping it from the teleological framework of antiquity, and grounding it instead in the fear of death and desire for self-preservation [11] (pp. 244–245). His natural law is no longer a reflection of a cosmic rational order, as when Cicero defined law as “the highest reason, rooted in Nature” [32] (p. 111), but a rational dictate derived from the passions.

Before examining the specific structure of this pole, it is necessary to clarify the concept of the state of nature on which it depends. The term itself was not Hobbes’s invention. As Widow has demonstrated, the expression status naturae entered political philosophy through a transformation of earlier theological distinctions [33] (pp. 276–277). In the scholastic theology of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, human nature was discussed through a series of states, including the state of integral nature, the fallen state, and, with particular importance for later political thought, the state of pure nature. Francisco Suárez gave this last notion a distinctive objective reality, treating it as a hypothetical condition that could be conceived apart from both grace and sin [34] (p. 214). It was this notion of a pure natural state, abstracted from supernatural determinations, that provided the conceptual material from which modern accounts of the state of nature were formed. Hobbes adopted the name and its hypothetical function, but removed it from its theological setting and turned it into the starting point for a purely political construction [34] (p. 221). This genealogy matters for the pole of delimitation, because it shows that the state of nature was, from the outset, a constructed condition. It was never a historical description or a given fact of human existence. It was a methodological device designed to isolate what political order must overcome.

This constructed character is visible in the way Hobbes defines the state of nature. He judges that without a public authority, human life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” [4] (p. 84). As Schmitt-Maass notes, this marks a turn in the natural law tradition: the state of nature is no longer an innocent state (status integritatis) related to a divine order, but a secularized hypothetical scenario lacking public power [35] (p. 21). Each person’s pursuit of self-preservation leads to a war of “every man against every man” [4] (p. 84). The deepest predicament is not violence, but the absence of a public standard of judgment. In the state of nature, “nothing can be unjust,” because “where there is no common power, there is no law: where no law, no injustice” [4] (p. 85). When each person judges what is necessary for self-preservation according to his own reason, disputes about justice and good and evil cannot be adjudicated. Crosato, summarizing Bobbio’s interpretation, outlines the objective conditions: the basic equality of human faculties, the relative scarcity of resources, and the resulting unlimited right (ius in omnia), which jointly produce “a permanent state of reciprocal lack of trust” [36] (p. 39) [12] (p. 206). It is this predicament that drives the establishment of a political body.

To say that the state of nature is constructed as the opposite of the political body does not mean that it is a condition without rights. Hobbes explicitly attributes natural rights to individuals in this condition. What the state of nature lacks is a public standard for adjudicating the exercise of those rights. The opposition is between a condition in which rights exist but cannot be secured, and a condition in which they are transformed into civil rights under a common power. This distinction is essential to the pole of delimitation. Natural law indicates the exit direction, but it does not, by itself, constitute a stable political order.

The pessimistic anthropology that drives this account has a further theological background. Hobbes’s state of nature inherits the anthropology of the fallen state while stripping it of the dimension of punishment. In the scholastic framework, human weakness and the tendency toward conflict were understood as consequences of original sin. Hobbes secularizes this structure in a functional sense: the same weakness and conflict remain, but they no longer signify a fallen condition subject to divine judgment. They become features of pure nature itself. Quintana and Sáenz Almazán describe this operation as a functional secularization of original sin, in which the idea of an insurmountable human limitation is preserved while its theological warrant is removed [37] (pp. 599–603). Widow similarly argues that Hobbes’s state of nature shares its anthropological content with the fallen state of scholastic theology, while excluding the reason of punishment that defined the fallen state as such [33] (p. 277). This background helps explain why Hobbes’s human being appears so negatively without any explicit doctrine of the fall. The pole of delimitation requires a human condition sufficiently deficient to justify the construction of an unlimited sovereign.

The tool for escaping this predicament is the contract, defined as “the mutual transferring of right” [4] (p. 89). Hobbes firmly distinguishes “right” (ius) as liberty from “law” (lex) as binding obligation. The distinction itself was not new. What was new was the function Hobbes assigned to it. By defining right as liberty rather than a normative claim, he transformed the contract from an act within an existing normative framework into the sole means of creating normativity from a normless state of nature [38] (p. 684). However, a contract requires trust, which the state of nature lacks: “he that performeth first has no assurance the other will perform after” [4] (p. 91). The contract must therefore be guaranteed by a coercive power transcending all parties. “Covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all” [4] (p. 111). Political order requires that: individuals mutually contract to relinquish their natural rights, and these rights are conferred upon a common power. Only when “the multitude so united in one person” [4] (p. 114) does the political body come into being. As Christov notes, “sovereignty is not the result of society, but the precondition for establishing social order” [39] (p. 492). Individuals agree to transfer their rights to it, but the sovereign itself is not bound. Any limitation would imply an adjudicator above it, triggering an infinite regress back to the state of nature [4] (pp. 116–118). The sovereign’s power is indivisible, inalienable, and cannot be legitimately resisted. As Chirila and Varga point out, this establishes an adjudicative center possessing “coercive power,” whose task is to “compel men equally to the performance of their covenants” [40] (pp. 35–36); see also [4] (pp. 95–96).

However, a tension persists. Hobbes acknowledges subjects’ political obligations are conditional [14] (pp. 183, 185). “The end of obedience is protection” [4] (p. 147). More crucially, “the right men have by nature to protect themselves, when none else can protect them, can by no covenant be relinquished” [4] (p. 147). Individuals retain the ultimate right to judge whether the sovereign has fulfilled its protective function [14] (p. 190). This continued existence of natural rights in civil society constitutes a tension with the sovereign’s absolute power. Such tension cannot be fully dissolved within the pole of delimitation. Hobbes responds that the interests of the sovereign and those of his subjects fundamentally coincide, but this relies on the presupposition that “any citizen thinking rationally about these shared interests must come to the same conclusion as any other” [41] (p. 291). As Duke argues, Hobbes’s “attempted reconciliation of positivistic and natural law commitments” is ultimately compromised by his sceptical and instrumentalist views on “practical reason and nominalist theory of truth” [13] (p. 626).

Two basic presuppositions underlie the pole of delimitation. First, conflict takes priority over association. The most fundamental human relationship in the state of nature is conflict and competition. The “perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death,” is not an accidental defect, but an inevitable consequence of self-preservation [4] (p. 66). Hobbes indeed acknowledged that men “desire to come together” [42] (p. 44). As Merriam pointed out, the assertion that Hobbes “ignored the fact of sociability” does not withstand examination of his philosophy [17] (p. 154). However, Hobbes insisted this desire was insufficient to serve as a stable foundation for political order [17] (p. 154). Sociability is not a natural quality but an acquired one, cultivated through education and sovereign coercion [17] (p. 155). This constitutes the fundamental divergence from Althusius, who regards the human tendency to associate as a requirement of natural law itself. Second, unity takes priority over mediation. The formation of a political community is a process from diversity toward unity. Intermediate groups such as families and guilds are rendered subordinate organizations permitted to exist by the sovereign. Schochet reveals the internal instability of this presupposition. Although Hobbes acknowledges the family exists in the pre-political state of nature, he derives paternal power not from procreation, but from the children’s tacit consent, thereby eliminating any source of natural authority independent of individual consent [43] (p. 429–434, 442).

From these presuppositions follows a structural feature of the pole of delimitation: political order does not grow out of natural human relations, but must be imposed through a unified center of adjudication. Crowe corroborates this from another angle: in Hobbes’s framework, political norms are binding because they are “the determinations of the common good principle,” and the content of the “common good” is ultimately determined by the sovereign [44] (p. 794). Zagorin further reveals how this operates: Hobbes maintained that the law of nature and the civil law “are not different kinds, but different parts of law” [11] (pp. 252–253). At first glance this resembles the traditional view, as in Aquinas’s formulation that “municipal law cannot enjoin anything which the law of nature forbids, or forbid what the law of nature enjoins” [11] (pp. 252–253). But the meaning is inverted. For Aquinas, civil law answers to natural law as an independent higher standard. For Hobbes, natural law is absorbed into civil law and possesses no legal efficacy apart from the sovereign’s command. Hobbes’s view is thus a transformation of natural law from a normative standard external, to human will into an instrument of sovereign power. The birth of the political body is therefore a decisive leap, from the state of nature into a political condition with a unified adjudicative center. As Hexter summarizes, in Hobbes’s political philosophy “there is no process; there are only two fixed conditions—states of being linked by a transforming instant” [45] (p. 486). This structure is the fundamental premise the pole of generation seeks to reject.

3. The Pole of Generation: Althusius on Natural Law as the Foundation of Political Order

Johannes Althusius (1563–1638), a Calvinist political thinker and jurist, studied at the Gymnasium Philippinum in Marburg and later earned his doctorate in canon and civil law at the University of Basel [46] (p. 762). At Basel he was influenced by both Calvinist piety and humanism. He began his academic career teaching law at the Calvinist Herborn Academy and later at the Academy of Burgsteinfurt [18] (p. 27) [47] (p. 32). In 1604 he became city syndic of Emden, a major Calvinist center and port city in northern Germany, and led its administration until his death in 1638 [2] (pp. 16–17). During his tenure, Emden was engaged in persistent conflict with the local count over religious and fiscal autonomy [48] (pp. 5–6). The conflict was not a simple jurisdictional dispute. It followed a popular uprising in 1595 and the consolidation of Calvinism in Emden, and it centered on the city’s claim to a form of self-government resembling that of an autonomous imperial city. Althusius was directly involved in the legal defense of this claim against the centralizing pressure of the count [49] (p. 83). His Politica is a systematic argument for the autonomy of multi-layered associations. This practical engagement with resisting absolutist centralization was, however, part of a broader intellectual formation.

Althusius did not develop his theory in isolation from the scholastic tradition. As Legaz y Lacambra observes in his discussion of Reibstein’s study, Althusius belongs to a line of thought that extends back to the School of Salamanca, and above all to Fernando Vázquez de Menchaca. The ideas of the Spanish school formed part of Althusius’s intellectual equipment, even though their theological spirit differed profoundly from his Calvinism: “He had taken over the secular-humanist doctrine of natural law with all its consequences, but he never spoke clearly about its theological and philosophical presuppositions, nor did he attempt any derivation or grounding” (Er hatte die profan-humanistische Lehre vom Naturrecht mit allen ihren Folgerungen übernommen, sprach sich aber niemals eindeutig über ihre theologischen und philosophischen Voraussetzungen aus und versuchte auch keinerlei Ableitung oder Fundierung) [50] (p. 457). Imbert similarly notes that Althusius’s path was prepared by French reformers and by the Spanish masters of the late sixteenth century [51] (p. 1018).

At the opening of his Politica, Althusius offers a definition of politics fundamentally at odds with the sovereignty tradition: “Politics is the art of associating (consociandi) men for the purpose of establishing, cultivating, and conserving social life among them. Whence it is called ‘symbiotics.’ The subject matter of politics is therefore association (consociatio), in which the symbiotes pledge themselves each to the other, by explicit or tacit agreement, to mutual communication of whatever is useful and necessary for the harmonious exercise of social life” [52] (p. 12). De Benoist accurately notes that Althusius “makes politics the fundamental concept of his entire theoretical construct” [18] (p. 30). Here, three key elements emerge. The essence of politics is association, the art of bringing people together rather than ruling. The purpose is symbiosis, the cultivation of common life. The mechanism is mutual communication, the exchange of what is useful and necessary. Political order resides in the associative relationship itself, not in an authoritative center standing above it.

Althusius invokes Plutarch’s threefold distinction of “polity” to support this position. The first meaning refers to the exchange and communication of rights within a community, the second to the manner of governance, and the third to the form of government and constitution [52] (p. 13). The sovereignty tradition typically adopts the third, as Bodin does, when defining sovereignty as the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth [53] (I.8). Althusius chooses the first: polity is first and foremost the communication of rights and the establishment of a reciprocal partnership.

If Hobbes’s state of nature is the condition to overcome, Althusius’s is the soil from which the political body emerges. Both acknowledge individual vulnerability. Althusius describes the infant as cast into life “destitute of all help, naked and defenceless, as if having lost all his goods in a shipwreck,” “not able by his own efforts to reach a maternal breast… Bereft of all counsel and aid… he is unable to help himself without the intervention and assistance of another” [52] (p. 12). However, the conclusions drawn are opposed. For Hobbes, vulnerability leads to competition and distrust. For Althusius, it proves the inevitability of mutual dependence. Because one cannot survive alone, people naturally seek assistance from one another. Humans possess a natural inclination toward ‘benevolence’ that draws them together rather than apart [2] (p. 21). In his Dicaeologica, Althusius further argues that natural law itself “urges people toward good and calls them back from evil,” thereby constituting the “foundation” of legal and political order [54] (p. 441). Bretherton captures the theological divergence: Hobbes regards political life as “a post-Fall development,” a remedy after human fall, while Althusius regards it as “an original part of creation,” a good inherent in human existence from the beginning [7] (p. 321).

This generative process begins with the family. Althusius divides associations into private and public. Private associations are formed by individual members through agreement (pactum), based on a common manner of life and the need to provide one another with what is necessary and useful [52] (p. 22). Among these, the family based on marital relations constitutes the most basic social unit. Althusius explicitly states: “The conjugal and kinship private association… are the seedbed of all private and public associational life” [52] (p. 26). He uses rights of blood (jura sanguinis) to refer to the rights established among family members by natural bonds. These rights are neither granted by a sovereign, nor created through social contract, but already exist in the state of nature. As de Benoist points out, the family as “seedbed” is not merely a sociological starting point, but also a normative source: the family itself is already a legitimate small community capable of supporting larger-scale political communities [18] (p. 34). On this point, Althusius inverts the sovereignty tradition’s understanding of the origin of the political body. Sovereignty theory typically faces the problem of state-founding qualification: “what… gives a particular set of people a special claim to… establish a state?” [55] (p. 774). For Althusius, the family, based on marital relations and rights of blood, constitutes the legitimate foundation for establishing a political community.

Starting from the family, associations are built upward layer by layer. Multiple families unite to form villages, neighborhoods, and civil private associations, such as guilds and commercial groups. When multiple private associations jointly establish a political order, public associations such as cities and provinces are formed. Public associations further unite to eventually form the universal public association (universalis consociatio), the federal commonwealth, a “community of communities, association of associations” [47] (p. 61) [19] (p. 8). At every level, smaller associations unite through agreement (pactum) to form larger ones. Unlike Hobbes’s contract, Althusius’s pactum is not a one-time act, in which individuals surrender all their rights to a sovereign. It is an agreement in which specific matters of administration are transferred to a higher level, while the autonomy of each association is preserved. As Hüglin notes, “smaller consociations always retained residual powers,” because they only “relinquished to the larger consociation what they considered necessary” [5] (p. 47). Power does not flow downward from a sovereign, but is generated upward from grassroots associations. The federal commonwealth is the agent of these associations, exercising power only within the scope of matters authorized by them [52] (p. 58) [56] (pp. 18, 21). The “only source” of power is “the right of symbiosis,” the organizational process itself through which the people communicate with one another in the course of association [2] (p. 24).

The pole of generation does not simply eliminate the problem of adjudication. Althusius recognizes that the universal association requires a supreme magistrate and a highest political authority. What he refuses is the identification of this authority with absolute sovereignty. In his framework, the universal association possesses majestas and summa potestas, but these terms designate a supreme authority that remains bound by the fundamental law of the association and by the residual rights of the constituent members. Rocca Fontaiña clarifies that Althusius uses the concept of majestas in the context of a compound political community, where the rights of sovereignty belong to the associated members rather than to the prince, and where supreme power is exercised under conditions established by the symbiotic pact [49] (pp. 91–93). Freire similarly stresses that Althusius attributes sovereignty to the associated members of the universal public association, understood as cities, provinces, and regions, rather than to an individual ruler [29] (pp. 10–12). This is the precise sense in which the pole of generation differs from the pole of delimitation. For Hobbes, political unity requires an unlimited and indivisible sovereign whose will replaces the dispersed judgment of the state of nature. For Althusius, political unity is compatible with a supreme authority, whose power is limited in scope and revocable in principle. The contrast concerns the absoluteness of the adjudicative center, not the existence of a center as such.

This distinction also clarifies the place of Althusius’s ephors. The ephors are officers instituted by the associated members to guard the fundamental law, to supervise the supreme magistrate, and to resist tyranny when necessary [49] (pp. 97–99). They are an institutional expression of the pole of generation, because they embody the principle that supreme authority remains accountable to the associative body from which it emerges. In this way, unity is not achieved by eliminating all lower-level judgment in favor of a single sovereign. It is by structuring judgment at multiple levels, and by binding the supreme magistrate to the terms of association.

The pole of generation stands in structural opposition to the pole of delimitation. First, association takes priority over conflict. The primary human relationships in the state of nature are mutual aid and symbiosis, not competition and hostility. Natural law does not require humans to escape the state of nature by establishing sovereignty. It requires them to develop the potential for sociability through association. Second, mediation takes priority over unity. Between the individual and the highest political authority, exist multiple layers of intermediate associations. These are not secondary organizations permitted by the sovereign, but constitutive elements of the political body. It is precisely because of these intermediate associations that the “pluralization of political order” and “diversity of associational life” become possible [7] (p. 328). Therefore, political order stems from generation rather than adjudication. Political order is not established by terminating the state of nature through a sovereign adjudicative center. It is generated layer by layer. Every level of association may develop norms applicable to its own affairs, and the legitimacy of these norms does not depend upon authorization from a supreme sovereign. Although Tuck [57] (pp. 5–6) does not directly discuss Althusius, his study on the origins of natural rights identifies a fundamental divide in seventeenth-century thought between passive rights, which are objects to be secured and regulated by sovereignty, and active rights, which individuals already possess and can exercise without sovereign authorization. Althusius’s pole of generation is a systematic early expression of the latter path. For Althusius, “the state could never become the central focus of politics” [5] (p. 47), because power is dispersed among associations at every level. Althusius thus rewrites the answer on how the political body comes into being: from establishing sovereignty to maintaining associations.

4. The Tension Between Two Poles: Pufendorf’s Unfinished Departure

The preceding two sections examined the two poles in their clearest early formulations. Hobbes regarded natural law as a premise to be overcome, while Althusius regarded it as the foundation from which the political body emerges. In intellectual history, these poles do not always appear in such clearly opposed forms. Pufendorf’s natural law theory provides a unique case. At the starting point, he departs from Hobbes, proceeding from sociability rather than individual self-preservation, treating the family as the natural foundation of the political body, and granting priority to horizontal association. However, at the endpoint, he returns to the pole of delimitation, insisting that the sovereign must enjoy unlimited supreme power. This unfinished departure reveals the core difficulty facing the pole of generation.

Pufendorf establishes “sociability” (socialitas) as the core requirement of natural law. The fundamental law is that: “every man ought to do as much as he can to cultivate and preserve sociality” [31] (p. 35). Natural law thus demands not isolated self-preservation, but the active cultivation of social relations. Pufendorf inherits Grotius’s concept of an appetite for society (appetitus societatis), while absorbing the Hobbesian concern with individuality, attempting to integrate the two [58] (p. 136) [59] (pp. 3–5). As Darwall points out, sociability is not merely strategic cooperation, but a normative duty: it “guides individuals on how to become beneficial members of society and represents a sacred duty toward God, oneself, and others” [60] (p. 343).

Palladini’s study, however, forces us to confront an unsettling proximity between Pufendorf and Hobbes. She argues that Pufendorf’s natural law is “fully Hobbesian” [25] (p. 50). Its scope is limited to this-worldly life and external actions, its deductive basis derives from human nature and the instinctive right of self-preservation, and his appeal to what is sociable is merely a repetition in different language of Hobbes’s counsel to “seek peace where possible, otherwise prepare for self-preservation” [25] (p. 51). Even Pufendorf’s image of “man abandoned in this world without the aid of other humans” (homo in hunc mundum proiectus) has its inspiration in Hobbes [25] (p. 49). Pufendorf’s strenuous efforts to distinguish himself from Hobbes, extensively citing Richard Cumberland in the 1684 second edition of De Jure Naturae et Gentium, may precisely indicate his awareness of this unsettling similarity [25] (pp. 52, 59). As Wokler summarizes Palladini’s research, Pufendorf’s sociability “was not designed to portray our original tendency towards society, still less our naturally benevolent disposition, but only a moral imperative necessary for human survival” [61] (p. 387).

The real difference is that for Pufendorf, “the law of nature had to be deduced from an altogether different principle” (omnino ex alio principio deducendum est): a divinely imposed duty to promote sociability that does not depend upon individual utility calculations [26] (p. 120). Saastamoinen clarifies the distinction: Hobbes derived natural law solely from concern for one’s own security, while Pufendorf held that “the mere fact that some rules are beneficial for one’s personal salus fails to indicate that a man has right to apply them as means toward his own preservation and that he is bound to observe them as by some law” [62] (p. 153). Haara further reveals the ambiguity of Pufendorf’s middle ground. Pufendorf attempts to distance himself from Hobbes, insisting that “natural goodness is an objective category that does not rely on variable and often mistaken individual desires and opinions” [28] (p. 247). However, he cannot, like Hobbes, reduce the good to individual desire, nor can he, like Aquinas, anchor it in a teleological structure intrinsic to human nature [28] (p. 247). If sociability is an externally imposed obligation rather than a tendency intrinsic to human nature, its distinction from Hobbes becomes blurred.

On the question of the family, Pufendorf shows a striking affinity with Althusius. He grants the family a foundational status in natural law, holding that it “in its essence, possesses natural-law character” [1] (p. 88). Marriage is “the first step into social life,” constituting the basis for all other forms of social union [31] (p. 114). He points out a “common kinship which results from similarity of nature” in the state of nature, that is “antecedent to any agreement or human action” [31] (p. 116). For Pufendorf, the state of nature is not a condition of isolated individuals, but an ordered network constituted by family relationships. However, a key difference from Althusius emerges, in how this family foundation relates to political authority. Pufendorf distinguishes three senses of the state of nature: the human condition relative to God, the individual condition without human mutual aid, and the free condition without political subordination [25] (pp. 35–38). This threefold distinction bears the mark of the scholastic differentiation of human states, and especially of the Suárezian notion of a pure state of nature, that Pufendorf inherited through the early modern natural law tradition [34] (p. 221). It is this third sense that is directly relevant to the construction of the political body. And in this sense, Pufendorf excludes family relations. Against his own earlier statement that the state of nature contains the kinship arising from similarity of nature, he insists in his Apologia that “a husband is master of his wife and a father of his son” [25] (p. 38, citing Pufendorf’s Apologia). This exclusion reveals the conceptual gap: for Pufendorf, the subordinate relations that exist naturally within the family and political subordination, belong to logically different categories. The family provides the rudiment of social life, but its form of authority cannot be directly transformed into political authority. Where Althusius sees the family as the seedbed from which political authority grows, Pufendorf sees a rupture that must be bridged by artificial agreement.

This leads to Pufendorf’s state-founding model of “two agreements and one decree.” The first agreement occurs among male heads of households, who mutually agree to unite into a lasting community. Then this community issues a decree determining the form of government. By this decree, ruling power is conferred upon some person or body, who assumes the duty of maintaining public safety and order. Through the second agreement, the subjects mutually oblige themselves to obey this ruler. The completion of the second agreement marks the point at which “a complete and regular state comes into being” [31] (p. 137). The horizontal dimension crucially precedes the vertical: “subjects agree with each other to obey, rather than with the sovereign” [31] (p. xxxiii). Individuals first mutually promise to form a horizontal political community, and then through this community produce a ruler. This structure contains a theoretical possibility: if authority derives from the community, the community is logically prior to the ruler, and its power could in principle be revoked. This is precisely what Althusius describes: as Hüglin summarizes, in the pole of generation power is “primarily a horizontal process of communication,” coming from “a plurality of groups or communities which all possess their own rights and obligations” [63] (p. 279). Pufendorf’s two agreements structure approaches this horizontal understanding at its starting point. Ramelet analyzes the duality of consent in this model: the establishment of political society is both a voluntary act proceeding from human freedom and a moral necessity prescribed by natural law, because “the Law of Nature cannot, amongst a great Multitude, be conveniently exercised, without the Assistance of Civil Government” [30] (pp. 306, 311, 318).

It is precisely at the final stage that Pufendorf parts ways with the pole of generation. He insists that sovereign authority (summum imperium) is supreme, not “obliged to account to any man on condition” [31] (p. 146). No matter how complex the founding procedure, once granted, this power is no longer subject to the grantor in its exercise. Rommen points out that Pufendorf’s thought still operates within an “enlightened despotism framework” [1] (p. 73). Although he emphasizes sociability and the priority of the community more than Hobbes, his ultimate arrangement of power retains a top-down distributive structure, rather than one generated from within the community. This return to absolute sovereignty is closely tied to his historical context. Saunders shows that Pufendorf’s entire conception of natural law was deeply shaped by the shadow of religious conflict after the Thirty Years’ War [64] (pp. 2174, 2179–2181, 2184). His core goal was to separate natural law from moral theology, “to adapt it to the understanding of the whole of mankind, who disagreed in many different ways over religion” [64] (p. 2180). To this end, Pufendorf limited natural law’s purpose “within the orbit of this life,” securing safety and social peace, rather than the salvation, and insisted that “only the civil sovereign has the prerogative and the responsibility of declaring which elements of natural law are to be promulgated as positive law” [64] (pp. 2181, 2184).

Pufendorf thus falls into a fundamental predicament. His starting point is sociability and horizontal community, his endpoint is absolute sovereignty. He cannot theoretically answer how order maintains its unity without a final adjudicator. From his perspective, the problem was of practical urgency: if the requirements of sociability cannot be enforced through a unified adjudicative center, then the “salus of the human species,” the fundamental goal of his natural law theory [26] (pp. 116, 120), cannot be secured. Cerman analyzes this as follows: when the requirements of sociability conflict with the unity of sovereignty, Pufendorf ultimately chooses sovereignty [58] (pp. 141–142). Saastamoinen provides a further clue: Pufendorf distinguishes between the universal duty of sociability incumbent upon all human beings, and the specific motives people have when establishing particular political societies [26] (pp. 121, 124). Pufendorf criticizes Hobbes’ failing in understanding “why everyone would not love everyone equally as equally men” [42] (pp. 42–43), and insists that, “natural law has ordained a duty of general friendship (amicitia) among all human beings,” that “is not dependent on the ability of the other person to help or hurt us, but solely on the fact that he or she is a human being” [62] (p. 154). However, Pufendorf simultaneously acknowledges that in the state of nature, this universal duty is “too weak and uncertain” to guarantee “the Safety of Mankind” [30] (p. 305). This gap between the normative force of sociability and its actual executive power, provides the logical necessity for the return of absolute sovereignty. Pufendorf acknowledges that Hobbes made a “rather clever deduction of natural laws solely from the care of one’s own welfare” [62] (p. 153). He “posits himself as a careful commentator of Hobbes and attempts to salvage aspects of Hobbes’s theory” [28] (p. 251). However, his own alternative, that “self-interest can be harnessed for the common good in civil societies,” still entrusts the ultimate normative enforcement to the sovereign’s educational and coercive functions, leaving unanswered the question of who socializes the sovereign [28] (pp. 252–253).

Pufendorf’s case thus shows that proceeding from sociability does not by itself lead to the pole of generation. The decisive point is the status assigned to the highest authority. Althusius had accepted a supreme authority that remained bound by the terms of association and answerable to the associated members. Pufendorf could not follow this path. When he transformed the horizontal community into a state, he conferred upon the sovereign an authority no longer subject to the community that had produced it. In this respect, his unfinished departure from Hobbes reproduces the central difficulty of the pole of generation. Once the demand for political unity is understood as the demand for an absolute adjudicative center, the associative foundation of political order is inevitably subordinated to the very power it was meant to constitute. The difficulty was not unknown to the wider natural law tradition. Aquinas had observed that the further one descends from the general principles of natural law to their application in particular cases, the more uncertain judgment becomes, and that in such cases one must seek counsel from those who are wise and experienced rather than defer to a single will [65] (pp. 215–216).

5. The Marginalization of the Pole of Generation

From the actual course of intellectual history, the pole of delimitation, with Hobbes’s Leviathan as its early expression, gradually became the mainstream narrative of modern political theory. The sequence “state of nature, social contract, sovereign state” came to be regarded as the standard model of political body formation. The pole of generation, with Althusius as its most systematic early expression, was marginalized for a long time. It was almost forgotten until rediscovered by Gierke [66] in the late nineteenth century, and gradually returned to academic discussion through the sustained efforts of Friedrich [67], Carney [52], and Hüglin [2,47,68]. This marginalization is not accidental, but a phenomenon requiring explanation. Three mutually reinforcing factors account for it: a conceptual predisposition within the natural law tradition itself, the institutional pressure of the post-1648 sovereign state system, and the historiographical exclusion of the scholastic inheritance from the lineage of modern natural law.

A deep centralization presupposition existed within the natural law tradition long before sovereignty theory’s rise. Natural law was regarded as coming from a unified, higher normative source, and the political body’s legitimacy depended upon proximity to this source. Already in antiquity, Heraclitus distinguished divine law from human law as “eternal norm and harmony” [1] (p. 6), while Antiphon separated φύσις (natural law) from νόμος (human law), holding that the former is necessary and unchangeable and the latter merely man-made and modifiable [69] (pp. 219–220). Cicero gave this structure its clearest formulation. Interpreting νόμος and νέμω as “division, distribution and distinction,” he declared that God is the one common master and ruler… He is the author, expounder, and mover of this law” [32] (pp. 71–72) [70] (p. 462). Vacura points out that three currents of natural law thought developed in Greek philosophy, and it was the third, natural law as the law of reason, that “shifts the focus to our rationality” [71] (p. 601). This rationalist current passed through the Stoics into Aquinas’s hierarchical scheme of eternal, natural, divine, and human law, all ultimately deriving from divine reason [72] (Q. 91) [73] (p. 253). In this structure, natural law flows from a higher source. Human beings apprehend it, but do not create it. This established a conceptual template: political order requires some authority to translate higher norms into binding rules. Hobbes transformed this template. As Zagorin shows, he makes self-preservation the primary principle instead of “good is to be done and pursued and evil avoided” [11] (p. 248), and in denying natural law any independent legal efficacy. For Aquinas, “natural law contains all that makes for the preservation of human life” within the framework of eternal law, while for Hobbes, natural law is merely a theorem of reason until the sovereign incorporates it into civil law [11] (pp. 248–249). Despite this break, the underlying structure of centralized distribution persists: what changes is the content filling it, which shifts from divine purpose to individual self-preservation. The template itself remained intact, and this conceptual ecology favored the pole of delimitation. Althusius’s pole of generation, by contrast, interrupted this presupposition: normativity stems not from a center but from symbiosis in associative life. Ironically, even Gierke, who rediscovered Althusius, misread him as the “true founder of the social contract theory” and a precursor of popular sovereignty, using “majestas” to refer to Althusius’s “rights of the people” [66] (p. 155). As Nitschke and Hüglin have criticized, this reading obscures Althusius’s true originality: he questions the mode of thinking about power distribution itself, not merely its ownership [68] (p. 245) [74] (pp. 187–195).

The rise of the sovereign state system after 1648 provided institutional reinforcement. Whatever the historical accuracy of the “Westphalian myth” [75] (p. 281), by the mid-to-late seventeenth century, sovereign states had become the primary actors in European politics. The consolidation of this state form was not the work of a single settlement. The growth of standing armies, the expansion of fiscal extraction, and the concentration of state power developed through long-term processes with uneven geographical and chronological rhythms, and that the causal relation between war and state formation remains contested [76] (pp. 690, 695) [77] (pp. 1–8). These processes nevertheless converged on the same institutional result: political authority was increasingly concentrated in centers capable of mobilizing resources and acting as single units in the international system. Unity became the foremost normative requirement of the political body. In the international system, a state participates in diplomacy as a single subject. This external pressure reinforced the internal concentration of power: a polity with dispersed power and multi-layered checks might appear vulnerable in competition. As Elazar notes, European states faced the need to “choose between the federalist and centralist models,” and the post-Westphalian world overwhelmingly favored the latter [78] (p. 2). Sovereignty theory provided a clear framework for exercising state power, refined continuously from Pufendorf to Rousseau and into nineteenth-century positivist jurisprudence. Even thinkers who revised Hobbes, such as Locke, accepted the basic narrative. In this ecology, a theory like Althusius’s that refused sovereignty as its starting point, could hardly find a foothold. As Hüglin notes, Althusius’s federalism was “largely forgotten” after Westphalia [79] (p. 29).

This marginalization was reinforced by a further factor that has received less attention: the active denial of the intellectual sources on which the pole of generation partly depended. As Carpintero has shown, Vázquez de Menchaca already formulated a natural law theory, in which the state of nature functioned as a condition of liberty, and in which political power arose through contract for the utility of the contracting members [80] (pp. 664–666). These ideas constituted a direct antecedent of Hobbesian and Lockean natural law. But this debt was later systematically minimized. Chroust observes that Pufendorf and his successors treated the natural law of the Spanish scholastics with open hostility, presenting Grotius as the true founder of modern natural law and dismissing the medieval and scholastic tradition as a “dark kingdom” (regnum tenebrarum) [81] (pp. 47–50, 56–57). This denial mattered for the fate of Althusius. His theory was partly nourished by the Salamanca tradition through Vázquez de Menchaca and Covarrubias, even as he transformed that inheritance within a Calvinist framework. When the Salamanca tradition itself was excluded from the lineage of modern natural law, Althusius’s position became doubly precarious. He stood outside the increasingly dominant sovereignty narrative, and the intellectual resources that might have made his alternative intelligible were simultaneously removed from view.

These factors, conceptual predisposition, institutional pressure, and historiographical exclusion, formed a self-reinforcing cycle. The centralization presupposition made sovereignty theory acceptable, while the sovereign state system confirmed this presupposition’s correctness. The denial of the scholastic inheritance removed one of the principal sources, from which an alternative account of political order could have been developed. The pole of generation faced the difficulty of explaining, how a polity built on dispersed power and multi-layered associations maintains unity and capacity for action. Such difficulty pushed the pole into the historical margins.

6. Conclusions

This study has argued that within the natural law tradition, two contrasting ways of understanding the emergence of the political body can be distinguished. Section 2 has shown that Hobbes constructs the state of nature as the opposite of the political body and makes the contractual leap into civil order the sole source of political unity. In this account, natural law merely indicates the exit direction. It cannot directly constitute the foundation of political order. As Rommen famously observed, Hobbes’s theory ultimately amounts to a denial of natural law in its traditional sense [1] (p. 73). The pole of generation, typified by Althusius, understands the political body as an extension of natural law. Beginning from the family as the most basic natural unit, it progressively generates larger political communities through multi-layered association. Natural rights are preserved and transmitted, rather than replaced. Political authority is generated from the symbiosis of associative relationships.

The contrast between these two poles has been sharpened by an important qualification. Althusius does not reject the existence of a supreme political authority. What he rejects is the identification of that authority with absolute sovereignty. His universal association possesses a highest magistrate and a form of majestas, but these remain bound by the fundamental law of the association, and by the residual rights of the constituent members. The real opposition between Hobbes and Althusius therefore lies in the status of the adjudicative center. For Hobbes, political unity requires an unlimited and indivisible sovereign. For Althusius, political unity is compatible with a supreme authority that is limited in scope and answerable to the associated body. This distinction clarifies the difficulty that Pufendorf confronted.

Pufendorf’s oscillation between the two poles reveals the difficulty facing the pole of generation. He proceeds from sociability, grants the family a foundational status in natural law, and gives priority to horizontal association in the state-founding procedure. All of these significantly deviate from Hobbes. But a closer connection exists than is usually acknowledged. Pufendorf ultimately returns to absolute sovereignty because he cannot theoretically answer how order can maintain its unity without a final adjudicator. His unique value lies not in having successfully escaped Hobbes’s shadow, but in showing that proceeding from sociability does not necessarily lead to the pole of generation. Without an alternative account of political unity, sociability may be reincorporated into the pole of delimitation. Pufendorf’s case thus exposes the difficulty that any account of bounded political unity must confront: once the demand for political unity is understood as the demand for an absolute adjudicative center, the associative foundation of political order is subordinated to the power it was meant to constitute.

This difficulty did not disappear when the vocabulary of early modern natural law gave way to other idioms of political theory. Consociational democracy, as developed in the study of deeply divided societies [82] (pp. 211–212), attempts to combine segmental autonomy with common political institutions, but its stability has repeatedly been shown to depend on external guarantors or on forms of cross-segmental judgment that the model itself does not fully specify. Legal pluralism pushes the problem one step further. It begins from the coexistence of multiple normative orders [83] (p. 38) and then finds that conflicts among them require interface norms, whose interpretation reintroduces the need for a body capable of adjudication [84] (pp. 254–258). They mark later moments at which the same structural problem reappears under different conditions. The movement from consociationalism to legal pluralism is a movement from externalized adjudication to the difficulty of conceiving bound adjudication without a shared constitutional frame. In both, the demand for a final decision reasserts itself, while the institutional resources for keeping that decision bound remain uncertain.

The marginalization of the pole of generation resulted from several conditions. The first is the centralization presupposition within the natural law tradition itself, which long conceived of normativity as flowing from a unified higher source. The second is the post-1648 consolidation of the sovereign state system, which made unity the foremost normative requirement of the political body. A third factor reinforced these two: the active exclusion of the scholastic inheritance from the lineage of modern natural law. This exclusion removed one of the principal intellectual sources from which an alternative account of political order could have been developed, and it rendered Althusius’s position doubly precarious. Together, these factors formed a self-reinforcing cycle that pushed the pole of generation to the historical margins.

Several limitations of this study need to be stated. Its examination focuses on three core figures, Hobbes, Althusius, and Pufendorf, but simplifies a richer intellectual landscape. To what extent Grotius provided a precursor for Pufendorf’s sociability, whether Rousseau’s general will constitutes another case of the tension between the two poles, and how far Locke’s modification of sovereignty departs from Hobbes’s account, all merit further examination. The analysis of the causes of marginalization is conceptual, rather than strictly causal. Moreover, whether non-Western traditions contain intellectual resources that resonate with the pole of generation is a question this study does not address.

Despite these limitations, the distinction between the pole of delimitation and the pole of generation provides an analytical framework for understanding the internal tensions of the natural law tradition. It also illuminates a tension that persists in contemporary debates about the foundations of political order. The question of how political order can be generated and maintained without relying on an absolute adjudicative center persists across three centuries of political thought. The unfinished character of Pufendorf’s departure from Hobbes suggests that this question remains open. And the resources for answering it may lie in the very tradition that the pole of delimitation helped to marginalize.