Friedrich Esaias Pufendorf

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Friedrich Esaias Pufendorf (born September 12, 1707 in Bückeburg , † August 25, 1785 in Celle ) was the eldest of numerous children of Esaias Pufendorf, who was then the chancellery and later chief appeal judge. This in turn was a nephew of the natural law teacher Samuel von Pufendorf .

Life

Friedrich Esaias moved with his family first to Minden , then later to Celle . There he was taught in public schools and by a private tutor until Easter 1724. Since he was 16 years old, his father taught him the basics of law .

He made his first public appearance on the name day of the Duke of Cornwall in 1724, where he gave a speech. As early as the next year he took the opportunity to recite a heroic poem he had written on the coronation festival of George I. Apparently he was in tune with the times, because the king then granted him a three-year scholarship totaling 240 thalers.

With the help of this scholarship, Pufendorf began studying law at the University of Halle . There he attended lectures by JH Böhmer, Nikolaus Hieronymus Gundling and Christian Thomasius, among others . He also dealt with Christian Wolff's teaching on the beginnings of mathematical science. At first he refused them, but subsequently became their followers. He later used the rationalistic arguments of Wolff's philosophy for his own work.

The scholarly trip of the young student turned out to be rather modest for the circumstances at the time. He visited Dresden, Freiberg, Chemnitz and Meißen. Then he returned to Celle, probably for lack of money.

When he arrived there, his father continued teaching him based on the Celle legal practice. He devoted himself to the study of Roman legal sources and patriotic law, especially German private law. Pufendorf's first contribution to legal science also falls into this phase: he finished a work on the Braunschweig-Lüneburg criminal and civil proceedings that his father had begun.

His first completely independently written font from 1730 was entitled "De privilegiis". The subject of the same was the question of whether obtaining the electoral dignity is also associated with a Privilegium de non appellando . His answer to that was positive. Although this question was not relevant for the Electorate of Hanover, as it had already received an illicit appeal privilege in 1718/1719, Pufendorf's statement is to be seen in connection with his intended admission to the civil service. So it is not surprising that he hastily launched his work for the Hanoverian ministry.

Despite these efforts, several applications for the desired position initially failed. So it happened in 1732 that he “completely met his ambition” as an attorney at the Higher Appeal Court in Celle and enrolled. In the following, Pufendorf's father tried several times to recommend his son. Friedrich Esaias Pufendorf himself hoped to attract attention through his writings and, as a tutor for Jus naturae and Institutiones, to make profitable contacts with influential personalities. Here it becomes clear that in the absolutist state it was not easy to pursue a career in civil service simply because of talents.

Pufendorf obtained his first position in the service of the Electorate of Hanover in 1734 as Assessor extraordinary at the Celle court. When his father died in 1738, he applied for his now vacant position as an appellate judge. This failed again. In the same year, however, he achieved the position he had longed for: not in Celle, but in the Grubenhagen landscape, which is also part of the Electorate of Hanover. He was sworn in on February 23, 1739.

In 1741 Pufendorf married the daughter of the Vice President of the Higher Appeal Court, Maria Clara von Hugo, and after her death in 1754 her younger sister Louise Henriette. In 1751 Pufendorf was elected a foreign member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences . In 1756 Emperor Franz I renewed the nobility of Pufendorf and his brothers, and in 1767 he was appointed Vice President of the Higher Appeal Court.

After going blind in the meantime due to an eye disease, he regained his eyesight after an operation in 1776 . In 1782 he fell ill with influenza. He never fully recovered from this, so that he died on August 25, 1785 in Celle.

plant

Pufendorf, with a wide range of interests, saw himself not only as a lawyer, but rather as a universal scholar . That was not unusual back then. For example, he distinguished himself through philological investigations in which he tried to find out the name “German” or the similarity of languages ​​and the meaning of the letters. He wrote scientific treatises on the "cause of the cold and warmth of the winds" and the swan song. However, it was rather amateurish work. His theological writings also met with little success. “Religio gentium arcana” from 1773, where he wanted to derive a divine revelation from early pagan mythologies, was condemned by the Protestant clerical authorities.

However, Pufendorf's legal work met with a positive response. While his first independently written work "De privilegiis" from 1730, as already described above, can be classified as an application document, his main legal historical work "De jurisdictione Germanica" from 1740 was already described by contemporaries as a "classic work". Pufendorf tries here by means of a historical perspective to delimit ordinary, extraordinary as well as sovereign and patrimonial jurisdiction from one another and thus to decipher the confusion that exists there. In “De culpa” from 1741 he applies Wolff's rationalistic method to a problematic of Roman law : the various degrees of culpa are to be recorded on the basis of the pandects by developing rules and consequential clauses .

In particular, it is thanks to the positive response to “De jurisdictione Germanica” that Pufendorf became a member of the historical class of the newly founded Royal Society of Sciences in Göttingen in 1751 . There he reviewed historical and legal new publications.

His life's work, however, are the “Observationes juris universi” published in four volumes, which Pufendorf occupied from 1744 to 1783. There are almost 1000 loosely consecutive, mostly brief considerations from all areas of law. They are largely based on the case law of the Celle Higher Appeal Court and, due to the destruction of the Celle Higher Court files, are still the most important source of the law then applicable in Hanover. The appendices are also significant. A number of land, town, village or knight rights from northern Germany were printed there, which to this day cannot be used in any other print. Because of these appendices and the work on criminal court constitution, Pufendorf is assigned to the early Germanists as a legal scholar. Pufendorf also drafted a Hanoverian land law .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 194.
personal data
SURNAME Pufendorf, Friedrich Esaias
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer
DATE OF BIRTH September 12, 1707
PLACE OF BIRTH Buckeburg
DATE OF DEATH August 25, 1785
Place of death Celle