 Pufendorf’s approach was secular, non-metaphysical, and anti-authoritarian; it eschewed religious appeals, scholastic dogma, essentialism, teleology, and the frequent mix of these that appealed to many German thinkers, Catholic and Protestant alike. Instead, it built on Bodin, Lipsius, Grotius, Hobbes, and the Italian reason-of-state tradition. Because of it, Pufendorf is known as a voluntarist in ethics, a sovereignty theorist in politics, and a realist in international relations theory. His kind of natural law is called ‘modern’ or ‘Protestant’ (Tuck 1987, Haakonssen 2004), in contrast to the metaphysical, neoscholastic, rationalist, or even Platonic version of the genre represented not only by the School of Salamanca (Suarez, Vitoria) but also Leibniz and then Wolff. Known as a philosopher and a jurist, Pufendorf was also a respected historian whose accounts of (mostly, the external relations of) various European states exemplified his basic philosophical concepts. He wrote notably on church-state relations, on intellectual and religious toleration, and on the Baconian theme of innovation in philosophy. Because of the clarity and comprehensiveness of his works, their intellectual acuity, and their polemical edge and consequent notoriety, they were translated into many European languages and thus provided – often in the form of pedagogical tools – many of the basic concepts and distinctions operative in the 18th-century discourse about morality, society, politics, history, and international affairs. Indeed, both directly and through his many editors, translators, and imitators, Pufendorf was largely responsible for the so-called ubiquity of natural law as a shared discourse during the following century (Haakonssen 2012).