Beyond Justice: Pufendorf and Locke on the Desire for Esteem

• Author: Tim Stuart-Buttle,Heikki Haara
• Published date: 01 October 2019
• Date: 01 October 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0090591718810224
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591718810224

Political Theory

2019, Vol. 47(5) 699 –723

© The Author(s) 2018

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591718810224

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Article

Beyond Justice: Pufendorf

and Locke on the Desire

for Esteem

Heikki Haara1 and Tim Stuart-Buttle2

Abstract

It is widely accepted that the seventeenth-century natural lawyers

constructed the minimal requirement for social coordination between self-

seeking individuals animated by the desire for self-preservation. On most

interpretations, Grotius and his successors focused on the “perfect” duties

(rules of justice) and had little to say about the “imperfect” duties of love

and civility. This essay provides an alternative reading of post-Grotian natural

law by reconstructing Pufendorf’s and Locke’s understanding of how the

duties of civility and love might be realised in civil society. The essay argues

that, for Pufendorf and Locke, the desire for esteem offers an explanation of

how people recognize the content of the reciprocal duties of social morality

and motivate themselves to act accordingly. The reconstruction of their

views on the beneficial effects of esteem-seeking points towards a new

interpretation of how, and why, philosophical interest in an economy of

esteem and the social nature of the self emerged, prior to their treatment

by eighteenth-century authors such as Hume and Smith.

Keywords

Esteem, recognition, self-preservation, justice, natural law

1Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

2Department of Politics, University of York, York, UK

Corresponding Author:

Tim Stuart-Buttle, Department of Politics, University of York, YO10 5DD, UK.

Email: tim.stuart-buttle@york.ac.uk

810224PTXXXX10.1177/0090591718810224Political TheoryHaara and Stuart-Buttle

research-article2018

700 Political Theory 47(5)

Introduction

It is now uncontroversial to claim that seventeenth-century natural jurispru-

dence set many of the questions that eighteenth-century philosophers sought

to address, and offered conceptual resources with which they sought to do so.

Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf are commonly presented as leading repre-

sentatives of a “modern” tradition of natural law that endeavoured to offer

what Aristotle and his scholastic successors supposedly had not: a theory of

justice that was truly universal as consistent with the inherent characteristics

of human nature, and the precepts of which were functionally necessary for

any stable society. This quest for universality precluded any appeal to the

Christian scriptures, because not all mankind had received them—and, in any

case, their meaning was contested bitterly even among those nations that had

enjoyed that privilege. In the aftermath of the European wars of religion, their

shared imperative was to discover the minimal requirements for social coor-

dination between individuals whose desires, wills and speculative opinions

tended to pull them in contrary directions. To this end, the “modern” natural

lawyers constructed their theories of justice upon a characteristic of human

nature that even the ancient sceptics, and their modern French admirers, rec-

ognised to be universal: the desire for self-preservation.1

In setting out these minimal requirements for social coordination, Grotius

distinguished between the legally enforceable rules of justice that preserve

the essential rights (suum) of the individual and the voluntary precepts of

social morality. Grotius thus contrasted the “perfect” rights and duties (jus-

tice strictly speaking) with the “imperfect” (the domain of “love”).2 The eigh-

teenth-century study of political economy developed in large part from within

this intellectual framework.3 It was deemed by its critics to be a morally

bankrupt science because it endorsed this supposedly realistic anthropology,

suggesting that in large-scale societies individuals are inclined to benefit one

another only insofar as they stand to gain materially by doing so. Adam

Smith’s famous dictum in the Wealth of Nations (1776) exemplifies this gen-

eral tendency: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or

the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own inter-

est. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and

never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”4

This essay shifts attention from the desire for self-preservation and the

“perfect” duties to an overlooked aspect of seventeenth-century natural law

theory that similarly stimulated further enquiry in the eighteenth century: the

compatibility between the individual’s desire for esteem (rather than narrow

self-interest or economic advantage) and the construction of a functioning

social order. We focus on two philosophers, Samuel Pufendorf and John