 Pufendorf’s thought is situated in post-Westphalian Europe, as the Holy Roman Empire underwent a reconfiguration of power relationships among its quasi-autonomous constituent states (Austria, Bavaria, Palatinate, Saxony, Brandenburg, and others), while maintaining a guarded posture toward external, competing powers such as France, England, the United Provinces, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, and Spain. Its main goals were to avoid relapse into confessional warfare, and to ward off the respective French and Ottoman threats on its western and eastern borders. In this context Pufendorf developed a theory about the moral relationships of agents (individuals and groups), the authority and duties of states, and the lawful interactions among these. His chief objective, too, was to avoid destructive social conflict and the devolution on any level into the antagonistic and, he thought, self-defeating condition known as the state of nature.