The natural law tradition offers two fundamentally opposed answers to the question of how a political body emerges. The first, exemplified by Hobbes, treats natural law as a pre-political condition of deficiency and conflict that the political body must transcend through a single contractual leap establishing an unlimited sovereign. The second, exemplified by Althusius, treats natural law as the normative foundation from which political order gradually grows through multi-layered association, beginning with the family. These two poles are analytical reconstructions of a broader contrast rather than an exhaustive classification of the tradition. This entry examines the structural tension between them through the case of Pufendorf, who departs from Hobbes by grounding natural law in sociability and granting priority to horizontal association, but ultimately returns to absolute sovereignty. His unfinished departure reveals the difficulty of sustaining the pole of generation, once political unity is identified with an absolute adjudicative center. This entry argues that the historical marginalization of the pole of generation stems from a centralization presupposition within the natural law tradition, the post-1648 consolidation of the sovereign state system, and the historiographical exclusion of the scholastic inheritance. This tension does not disappear when the vocabulary of natural law gives way to later theories of political order.