Samuel von Pufendorf, the German political and legal philosopher and historian, was born in Dorfchemnitz, in Meissen, Saxony, the son of a poor Lutheran pastor. A scholarship enabled Pufendorf to attend the famous Prince's School at Grimma. From 1650 to 1656 he attended lectures on Lutheran theology and Aristotelian philosophy at Leipzig. Somewhat later he studied contemporary philosophy at Jena, where he also read newly published books on mathematics and discovered the works of Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes. At Jena he came in contact with Erhard Weigel, a former teacher of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, whose strange but original method of teaching ethics "mathematically" made a lasting impression upon Pufendorf. To Weigel, Pufendorf owed the inspiration for his first work on the general principles of law, Elementorum Jurisprudentiae Universalis. In 1658 Pufendorf became a tutor in the house of the Swedish ambassador to Denmark. When...