THE CONTEXT OF THOMASIUS' PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY

Until recently the distinctive character of Christian Thomasius' contribution to the social and political theory of the Frühaufklärung has proved difficult to identify. Partly this is a factor of the way in which his multifarious writings evade conventional categories: such a literary figure, who wrote across so many disciplines, and often in a highly controversial style, is often easy to dismiss as supercial. But the neglect is also attributable to the extreme complexity of the intellectual context in which Thomasius was working as the leading German disciple of Pufendorf. This chapter will attempt to elucidate this context through offering a detailed account of Thomasius' uneasy and changing relationship with Pufendorf's natural jurisprudence.

As Palladini has shown, Pufendorf's intellectual inheritance was both puzzling and contradictory. While Pufendorf's major writings on natural law associated him closely with Hobbes, his defensive polemics and especially his ‘history of morality’ developed an alternative account of the intellectual origins of his arguments. Together with other commentators of the second generation Thomasius had first of all to identify Pufendorf's ‘real’ achievements, next to reconstruct their intellectual antecedents, and then to defend Pufendorf's ideas against the other competing discourses of natural law associated with Leibniz, Coccejus and Christian Wolff.

Over and above these intellectual goals, Thomasius was heavily engaged in reforming the university syllabus at Halle in the direction of eclecticism, the philosophical outlook which he believed was best embodied in Pufendorf's work.