Jean Bodin Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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One of the most influential French political thinkers of the sixteenth century, Jean Bodin (1529/1530–1596) was a product of his times. Born in Angers, France, he studied and then taught law at the University of Toulouse in the decade before the outbreak of the French Religious Wars (1559–1598). In the 1560s, as France descended into political and religious civil war, Bodin practiced law as an avocat in Paris. Two publications in the 1560s brought him public notoriety. The first, Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, 1566), advocated the comparative study of all legal codes in the search for the strongest on a specific topic. The second, Response aux paradoxes de M. Malestroit (Response to the Paradoxes of Malestroit, 1568), addressed the relatively new but pressing problem of price inflation.

In 1571, Bodin entered the household of the Duc d’Alençon, the king’s brother, and in 1576 he took part in a meeting of the Estates General of France called by Henry III during a crisis point in the sectarian and political conflicts of the religious wars. In the same year he published his seminal work in political philosophy, Les six livres de la république (Six Books of the Republic), which advocated a political system that concentrated power in a hereditary monarch. In 1587, he became procureur au roi for the town of Laon and was an active participant in the Catholic League, which first rebelled against Henry III and then sought to thwart the accession of the Protestant Henry IV to the throne of France. Despite his participation in the Catholic League, he wrote in 1588 the controversial Colloquim Heptaplomeres, which made the case for religious tolerance. The Colloquim only appeared in print posthumously in 1596.

Bodin’s single most important contribution to political thought was his transformation of the study of public law through a new definition and demarcation of supreme power in his Les six livres. His basic premise was that sovereignty was indivisible. He was less concerned with the origins of this power than with its practice. Key to this idea was a theory of ruler sovereignty that entirely concentrated high power in one individual or group and rejected the idea that power could be shared or distributed among separate agents. Thus, Bodin argued that royal servants were delegated authority and possessed no power of their own. Indeed, royal power was only limited by customary law insomuch as prudence and good government made respect for custom and natural law advantageous to the sovereign. It should be noted, however, that Bodin chose to construct his powerful sovereign using the model of a patriarchal family rather than mystical theories of the royal persona upon which other French political thinkers drew. His ideas proved particularly influential in the half century after the first publication of the Les Six livres in 1576 and continued to influence thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Bibliography:

Bodin, Jean. Selected Writings on Philosophy, Religion, and Politics, edited by Paul Lawrence Rose. Geneva: Droz, 1980.
Bodin: On Sovereignty, edited by Julian H. Franklin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Franklin, Julian H. Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.