 Samuel Freiherr von Pufendorf (1632–1694) was almost as unknown during most of the 19th and 20th centuries as he had been familiar during the preceding hundred years and more. His fate shows well how philosophical interests shape historical background narratives. More or less consciously, individual thinkers and the traditions they spawn frame themselves in terms of an edited past which – as in other forms of genealogy – they either appropriate, reject, revise, or ignore. Thus intellectual ancestry is always more controversial than biological inheritance, and the mere presence or absence of thinkers in particular developmental accounts is not necessarily an accurate indication of their actual historical role or importance.