 State formation is explicitly driven by fear, and there is ample reference to human wickedness, self-concern, and a willingness to injure in Pufendorf’s sketch of the pre-civil condition (DJN VII.1–2). Still, his comments are qualified even here, in opposition to Hobbes, and they do not amount to an anthropological claim about the exclusive selfishness of all human beings – which is not needed for the argument (DJN VII.1.5, 7–8). In fact, the discussion of pre-civil conditions and institutions clearly tempers such pessimism. For while those arrangements rely on formal promises and pacts, they are also induced by and certainly compatible with mutual affection, a desire for friendship, and the enjoyment of conviviality (DJN VII.1.5, 2.4; VIII.4.3, 6.2; II.2.7, 3.16). To be sure, such means and motives become increasingly incapable of maintaining them, as the complex feelings regulating smaller, simpler, and more intimate human interactions evolve into a cruder and colder psychology of scale among composite moral persons or groups. That is, with the reduction of familiarity, predictability, and commonality of purpose comes a sort of primitivizing of motives in the direction of fear. Still, Pufendorf’s state is not built on a thick, essentialist, or teleological (philosophical or theological) anthropology – even of a negative sort – but on an empirical, historical, or realistic assessment of actual human affairs. This means both that the state’s minimalist function as a mutual protection agency may not be controlled or overridden by other, substantive (e.g., religious, ethical) ends, but also that, since fear does not necessarily eliminate other human motives but only suppresses or distorts or overrules them, the state as guarantor of mutual security may actually allow these to function (again) in their proper (subordinate) contexts.