This chapter gives an account of Pufendorf’s discussion and use of the law of nations. It first outlines his distinctive contribution to contemporary discussions of the topic, namely his rejection rejection, against Grotius, of a specific “positive” law of nations distinct from the law of nature. Secondly it explains how this position relied on Pufendorf’s voluntarist conception of law as the command of a superior and on his conception of the state of nature as devoid of such superiors. The law of nations was simply the law of nature applied to states as composite persons in the state of nature, and the treaties and alliances concluded between them could not amount to a separate and obligatory law of nations. Thirdly, against this background, the chapter shows how Pufendorf discussed the law of war, disentangling the perfect and imperfect obligations of the law of nations from custom, civil laws, and pacts and agreements. Finally, the chapter analyses Pufendorf’s own casuistic use of the law of nations in the various polemical works he published in the service of his sovereigns, especially the King of Sweden, often in line with the theoretical position he developed but also departing from it when opportune.

Guastini argues that legal positivism was first conceived as a type of legal philosophy by Norberto Bobbio in 1950, and that Bobbio later distinguished between methodological positivism, theoretical positivism and ideological positivism. For Bobbio, methodological positivism is a (normative) view about legal scholarship, namely, that it should be descriptive; that theoretical positivism is a substantive theory of law, according to which law is a set of commands issued by the sovereign, legal interpretation is a cognitive enterprise, and the application of law is a matter of deduction; that ideological positivism is the view that one ought to obey the law regardless of its content; and that all three types of legal positivism share the view that there is no such thing as natural law. As Guastini explains, contemporary Italian legal philosophers reject theoretical positivism and mostly conceive of legal positivism along methodological lines, holding that there is no natural law, that it is important to distinguish between expository and censorial jurisprudence (in Bentham’s terminology), and that there is no obligation to obey the law all things considered or regardless of the law.

Hobbes’s striking On the Citizen position that “all the mind’s pleasure is either glory (or to have a good opinion of oneself), or refers to glory in the end” disappears in Leviathan. In this chapter, Lloyd argues that in stepping back from his On the Citizen assertion of a universal basic motive, which she analyzes as aiming to secure self-admiration, Hobbes loses sight of a tremendous potential resource for stabilizing political society. This motive can, in a properly designed commonwealth, motivate compliance with the requirements of morality; and adherence to a correct morality, such as that which Hobbes would have to be taught to all, is enormously helpful in securing civil peace. Re-attention to On the Citizen helps us to recover that insight, and from it to develop an argument that Hobbes could have used to his benefit.