This retrospective ‘illusion’ has greatly influenced later scholarship, giving us a distorted image of Pufendorf's own view of socialitas. In order to do this, Pufendorf tried to rethink his own position within the history of ethics, and put himself on the side of the Stoics, of Grotius and of Cumberland, against Epicurus and Hobbes. This article takes, instead, Pufendorf to be a follower of Hobbes, and tries to explain how the more traditional view of Pufendorf as a critic of Hobbes was in some way due to Pufendorf's own attempt to distance himself from the accusations of Hobbesism (and hence of atheism and moral indifference) that the critics made against him when his work first appeared. In fact, a traditional historiographic topos is that Pufendorf and Hobbes fundamentally disagree on the doctrine of socialitas, while the former is closer to Grotius and to the Aristotelian-classic tradition that see man as a social animal. In particular, this article examines the relationship between Pufendorf and Hobbes with regard to this central theme.

) is central to the interpretation of his work, even though this means to pose again a new number of questions already discussed in the scholarly literature. Given the prominence and importance of this theme in Pufendorf's work, a close analysis of what he meant by it (. Moreover, Pufendorf linked the issue of socialitas to the question of the state of nature, thus raising important issues with both theological and philosophical implications. No interpreter of Pufendorf can therefore avoid dealing with it. The reason is that Pufendorf himself declared that socialitas was the foundation of natural law. He considered male's (general) superior physical strength to be the basis of patriarchy, won by conquest over women's natural seniority when it came to child-rearing.No doctrine of Pufendorf's is better known than that of socialitas. Hobbes was accused in his time of being an atheist, believed the state of nature to be matriarchal, and had a notoriously cynical view of human nature. Hobbes was born prematurely, apparently due to maternal stress (the arrival of the Spanish Armada off the coast of England), which has been linked to both autistic traits and sexlessness. He remained unmarried throughout his life, bore no children, and has been posthumously claimed to have had exhibited symptoms of Asperger's syndrome. Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher, historian and mathematician best known for developing the highly influential social contract theory in his work Leviathan.

The Endlands by Vincent Hobbes