The Figure of Man and the Territorialisation of Justice in ‘Enlightenment’ Natural Law: Pufendorf and Vattel

Discussions of early modern philosophical anthropology in postcolonial studies often treat it as tied to Eurocentric conceptions of civilisational supremacism and to the ideologies of imperialism and colonialism served by these conceptions. In discussing the conceptions of man contained in two key early modern doctrines of the law of nature and nations – those of Samuel Pufendorf and Emer de Vattel – this paper casts a sceptical eye on the postcolonial accounts. The anthropologies deployed by Pufendorf and Vattel relate not to European imperialism and colonialism but to intra-European problems associated with the formation of territorial states and the bellicose relations between them.