 This reading of the modern natural law project is rooted in the texts, it was promoted by Barbeyrac, and it has been persuasively articulated mainly by Tuck (1979, 1987). However, aside from criticisms focused on its casting of Grotius and Hobbes (Mautner 2005, Sommerville 2001, Zagorin 2000), it also seems wanting now as a comprehensive interpretation of Pufendorf by being too inattentive to his more immediate social and intellectual contexts. These included the political and confessional status of the Empire and, more specifically, the metaphysical, theological, and Lutheran culture of northern Germany, Saxony in particular – as represented by conservative, Platonizing scholastics like Johann Benedict Carpzov, Adam Scherzer, Valentin Veltheim, and Valentin Alberti, with whom Pufendorf and his younger colleague, Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), contended through much of their academic lives (Hunter 2007b, 2001; Palladini 1978; Sparn 1976). This conflict was practical and immediate as well as theoretical, affecting German academic culture for another century up to and including Kant (Hunter 2005). For the opponents propounded a theocratic politics guided by Scriptural interpretation and supernatural metaphysics accessible only or especially to (philosophical) theologians, in contrast to the secular conception of the state and its subsidiary institutions (such as the judiciary and the universities) proposed by Pufendorf and Thomasius. In fact, the two readings may intersect and complement one another. For Grotius, Hobbes, and also Descartes (especially his idea of philosophical liberation and innovation) certainly influenced Pufendorf, albeit in a characteristically German, Protestant, and Lutheran setting that he helped to transform with their assistance (Friedeburg 2008, Friedeburg and Seidler 2007, Dufour 2005, Schmoeckel 2013b).