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Two Poles of Natural Law in the Formation of the Political Body: History
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Contributor: Lingkai Kong , Zeyuan Wang

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.

  • delimitation
  • generation
  • natural law
  • Hobbes
  • Althusius
  • Pufendorf
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.

This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper https://doi.org/10.3390/encyclopedia6090199

References

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