Polytechnic University of the Philippines

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Jean Bodin: Theory of Sovereignty and Absolutism

How Jean Bodin established his own definition of

State and Sovereignty, other contributions of him?

Christian Ian P. Lim

MPA 627 – Science and Philosophy of Public Administration

Dr. Ofelia Empemano

 Jean Bodin and Absolutism

The late-sixteenth, seventeenth, and early-eighteenth centuries in Europe are

sometimes described as the age of absolutism. In many European countries, the
power of the state - typically governed by a king - grew at the expense of regional and
individual liberties. In France, for example, royal power had fallen to a low point in the
late sixteenth century during a period of religious civil wars between Catholics
and Huguenots, but then began to rise sharply under Henry IV (1589-1610),
under Louis XIII (1610-43) and his chief minister Cardinal Richelieu (d. 1642), and
especially under Louis XIV (1643-1715).

One of the most famous and influential theorists of absolutism was the Frenchman Jean
Bodin (1529 or 1530 to 1596). After receiving a good education in classical languages
and literature, he studied law, and became a successful lawyer, judge, and (at times)
advisor to members of the royal family. Bodin may have flirted with Protestantism, but
eventually he came to believe that religious civil war was an extremely bad idea, and
that all French people ought to put their country before ambitions to enforce their
religion. Peace was more important than religious unity. People like Bodin who put
political before religious considerations were called politiques (a word closely
connected with the English terms "politic" and "politics," which were just becoming
fashionable then). It is possible that Bodin personally came to believe in a religion that
contained Islamic and especially Jewish elements, as well as Christian ones, and that
he wrote a book called the Colloquium of the Seven in which he develops his eclectic
and syncretist ideas. TheColloquium was attributed to Bodin and circulated in
manuscript in the seventeenth century, and published as his in the nineteenth, but his
authorship has recently been questioned. Though Bodin supported religious toleration,
he strongly advocated the persecution of witches, and wrote a lengthy book
on witchcraft.
Bodin's major political work was the Six Books of the Commonweal (or State) (Six livres
de la république), which was published in French in 1576 - at the time of the religious
wars - and in a Latin translation (by Bodin himself) ten years later (when the religious
wars were still going on). It was frequently reprinted in both languages, and translated
into others including English (in 1606; this is the only complete English translation; it
was reprinted by Harvard University Press in 1962, edited by Kenneth McRae). Our text
of the Six Livres is a condensed version of the book, abridged by M. J. Tooley (1955).
Bodin's book is a very wide-ranging discussion of political and social organization,
discussing different forms of government, the influence of climate and geography on
politics, the relationship between states and subordinate bodies, and so on. In its
standard sixteenth century French version, it runs to over 1000 pages. it has claims to
being the first full-scale work of political science.

Especially important for the later development of political theory was Bodin central
doctrine - of unlimited and indivisible sovereignty. According to this doctrine, in every
state there must be one person (or one defined group of people) who has all the powers
necessary to govern the community, and who is its sovereign. If one person made laws,
but another commanded the army, and a third ran the economy, there would be eternal
disagreements, and the state would soon collapse. So sovereignty cannot be divisible
between different people. Again, a sovereign who was accountable to someone else
would not really be sovereign; so no one can have the right to impose limitations on the
power of sovereigns, or to resist them by force of arms. Though Bodin held that people
have no right to rebel against the sovereign, he argued that we ought not to obey
sovereigns if they command things that are contrary to the law of God or the law of
nature. These laws established religious and moral rules which no one could
countermand. If the sovereign ordered us to break the rules (say, by stealing, or
committing adultery) we would have to disobey him, but meekly accept whatever
punishment he inflicted on us (Bodin thought of the sovereign as "he"/ "him": he held
that rule by women was a very bad idea, and criticized the government of Elizabeth I of
England, irritating English writers).

Bodin's sovereign, then, was not wholly unlimited - not as unlimited as the sovereign in

Hobbes' thinking, for example. Was Bodin right to think that there must be an indivisible
and (largely) unlimited sovereign in each state? Was he right to claim that there are
some moral rules which even the sovereign cannot authorize us to break? What can be
said for and against the idea that Bodin was an absolutist, or that the states of the
seventeenth century were absolutist? In what ways, for example, do Bodin's
recommendations about state power fall short of things we now take for granted (e.g.
state control over education, health, food, policing, etc.)? How do Bodin's ideas differ
from the theory of the "Divine Right of Kings"?

A few suggestions for further reading:

J. H. Burns, "Absolutism: the history of an idea," London 1986 (a lecture; clear, short
discussion); 
Julian Franklin, "Sovereignty and the mixed constitution: Bodin and his critics," in J. H.
Burns, ed., with the assistance of Mark Goldie, The Cambridge History of Political
Thought 1450-1700, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, 298-328 (on
Bodin's influence and German replies to him); 
Nicholas Henshall, The myth of absolutism, London 1992 (argues that absolutism did
not exist); 
James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann Sommerville, 1994; classic British
absolutist texts, esp. the brief True law of Free Monarchies); 
Johann Sommerville, "Absolutism and royalism," in J.H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge
History of Political Thought 1450-1700, Cambridge 1991, 347-73 (overview of
seventeenth-century absolutism, the Divine Right of Kings, etc.).

Theory of Sovereignty

The modern concept of sovereignty owes more to the jurist Jean Bodin (1530–1596)
than it does to any other early modern theorist. Bodin conceived it as a supreme,
perpetual, and indivisible power, marked by the ability to make law without the consent
of any other. Its possession by a single ruler, a group, or the entire body of citizens
defined a commonwealth as monarchy, aristocracy, or popular state. Without it a
commonwealth was not properly a state at all. In his Six livres de la république (1576;
Six books of the commonwealth) Bodin came to favor absolute monarchy, but the
legacy of medieval juristic ideas and the political conflicts of his time led him into some
contradictions and changes of front.

In the sixth chapter of his MethodusadFacilemHistoriarumCognitionem (1566; Method

for the easy comprehension of histories) Bodin first discussed the nature of sovereignty,
which he called in Latin suverenitas. Using a comparative historical method, he
classified past and present states and empires and reviewed the opinions of Roman law
jurists on the meaning of such terms as summum imperium (the highest authority)
and merum imperium (unqualified authority). He insisted that the mixed state was an
impossibility, but at this stage he did not stress the legislative function. It was listed as
only the second of five functions of sovereignty, the others being creating magistrates,
declaring war and peace, hearing judicial appeals in the last resort, and deciding on life
or death where the latter was the prescribed penalty. In The Commonwealth making
and unmaking law became the sole function, engrossing all the rest. Here Bodin was
influenced by Roman law traditions that saw legislative power as command or will, as
expressed in the maxim "what pleases the prince has the force of law" (quod
principiplacetlegisvigoremhabet). His term for sovereignty became souveraineté in
French and majestas in Latin.

The main reason for Bodin's change of heart was probably the desire
to outflank theories of legitimate resistance to the French crown advanced by Protestant
writers in the contemporary civil wars. However, he did suggest certain limitations on
the power of what he termed "royal monarchy," as distinct
from lordly and despotic types of rulership where power knew few or no boundaries. In a
royal monarchy, such as France, England, Scotland, and Spain, the sovereign was
bound to observe divine and natural law; he could not tax his subjects without their
consent; he should keep contracts with his subjects; and he was unable to alter certain
fundamental laws, such as the laws of succession to the throne. Despite these
limitations, the power of a royal sovereign was termed "absolute," and this is not
surprising, since Bodin undermined most of these constitutional reservations. The
sovereign was the sole judge of divine and natural law; he could tax without consent in
emergencies; and he could decide that contracts were no longer operative when, in his
view, a subject had ceased to benefit from them. An additional novelty was introduced
in The Commonwealth. While continuing to insist on the indivisibility of sovereignty and
the impossibility of the mixed state, Bodin made a distinction between the form of the
state and the method of its administration. A sovereign might choose to administer his
realm using officials of aristocratic or popular origin, thus giving the false impression of
mixture.

Bodin's Interpreters
In the seventeenth century Bodin's idea of absolute sovereignty became influential
throughout most of Europe. In France it was absorbed into the prevailing doctrine that
kings were appointed by God and responsible to him alone, but its juristic elements
remained important and were even strengthened in some respects. The jurists Charles
Loyseau (1564–1627) and Cardin Le Bret (1558–1655), for example, eliminated Bodin's
view that the sovereign should normally obtain consent to taxation in their respective
treatises Traité des seigneuries (1608; On lordships) and De la
souverainetéduRoi (1632; On royal sovereignty). Le Bret invented the celebrated
phrase that sovereignty was as indivisible as a point in geometry.

Bodin, whose Commonwealth was translated into English in 1606, was often cited in

political discourse in England during the early part of the reign of Charles I (1625–1648),
but it was not until war broke out between the king and the Long Parliament in 1642 that
his concept of sovereignty seemed relevant to English conditions. The
militant pamphleteer who later made his peace with the Stuarts, William Prynne (1600–
1669), adapted Bodin to claim sovereignty for Parliament without the king in  The
Soveraigne Power of Parliaments and Kingdomes (1643). He also enlisted French
sixteenth-century resistance theorists in the parliamentary cause, associating the
underlying authority of the people with sovereign power in a way that would have
been anathema to Bodin. Opposing polemicists referred at times to Bodin in support of
Stuart absolutism, but the general policy of Charles I's advisers was to assert that it was
Parliament that had broken the mixed English constitution by asserting a superior
authority.
In Germany Johannes Althusius (1577–1638), professor of law at Herborn (Nassau)
and syndic of Emden, had close ties to the resistance to Spanish rule in the Netherlands
and sympathized with French resistance literature. Like Prynne forty years later, he
linked these ideas with the Bodinian definition of sovereignty, but in a much more logical
fashion. His PoliticaMethodiceDigesta (1603; Politics systematically analyzed)
concluded that in every state Bodinian sovereignty reposed inalienably in the
community as a whole, and that rulers and magistrates were mere delegates of the
people. This, he asserted, was what Bodin had implied when he held that fundamental
constitutional laws belonged to the sovereignty and not to individuals who ruled in
name.

Other German jurists resented Bodin's classification of the Holy Roman Empire as
an aristocracy and of the emperor as no more powerful than the doge of Venice. Some
ingeniously exploited Bodin's qualifications to his theory to make it fit the complexities of
the German constitution. Henning Arnisaeus (1576/1579–1636), a physician who acted
as political adviser to the king of Denmark, criticized Althusius and defended
monarchical sovereignty in a manner closer to Bodin's intentions. His best-known
theoretical work, De Jure Majestatis (1610; On the right of sovereignty), not only
defended Bodin's denial of the mixed state, but refused to admit its equivalent through
Bodin's distinction between form of state and method of government. However, the
complications in imperial institutions led Arnisaeus to suggest that the attributes of
sovereignty could be distributed among several authorities.

Another German theorist, the Hebrew scholar BartholomäusKeckermannofGdańsk

(1571–1608), used the distinction between form and method to argue in
his SystemaDisciplinaePoliticae (1606; System of political science) that the empire was
monarchic in form but aristocratic in governance. Perhaps the most discerning German
commentator on Bodin's theory of sovereignty was ChristophBesold (1577–1638), who
taught jurisprudence at Tübingen and Ingolstadt. He adopted the theory of double
sovereignty, in which personal sovereignty (majestaspersonalis) resided in the ruler or
in a corporate entity of unequal parts (such as the emperor and the diet), while real
sovereignty (majestasrealis) lay permanently in the community as a whole. The latter,
however, could only be exercised as a constituent power when government collapsed
and a new constitution was needed. These views were expressed in PoliticorumLibri
Duo (1618; Two books on politics). Besold also remarked that, if personal sovereignty
was shared among several persons in an aristocracy, it was pointless to deny the
possibility of the mixed form.

Grotius and Pufendorf

The idea of constituent power was also implied by the influential Dutch statesman and
jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645). Although he had some constitutional reservations,
Grotius strongly admired Bodin's view of monarchical sovereignty. His best-known work
was De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625; On the law of war and peace), in which he preferred
the Roman law term summum imperium to majestas. He suggested two possessors of
sovereignty, the proper owner (subjectumproprium) and the communal
owner (subjectum commune), but denied that the latter could be invoked to support
resistance. It resembled a theory propounded by Arnisaeus, who held that the whole
community or civitas existed as a latent corporation to protect property rights.
In 1672 Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694), a Saxon jurist at Heidelberg who entered the
service of the king of Sweden, published his De Jure Naturae et Gentium (Of the law of
nature and nations), a book comparable with Grotius's War and Peace. A student of the
German constitution, he was more critical of Bodin than was Grotius, and he generally
found German institutions too complex to fit the straitjacket of any political theory.
Nevertheless, he described sovereignty in terms of a legal fiction as "a composite moral
person (persona moraliscomposita) whose will . . . is deemed the will of all; to the end
that it may use and apply the strength and riches of private persons towards maintaining
the common peace and security."

Hobbes, Bossuet, and Rousseau

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), perhaps the most logical of all the theorists of
sovereignty, achieved a level of abstraction in his masterpiece, Leviathan (1651), which
ignored historical facts and previous thinkers with equal disdain. Superficially, Hobbes's
concept of sovereignty appears similar to Bodin's in terms of absolute power,
indivisibility, and the voluntarist view of law, but its premises are entirely different.
Human beings were not, in terms of Aristotelian organicist imagery, by nature social and
political animals: they were egotistical beings whose mutual hostility had created a
savage state of nature from which they were obliged to escape by agreeing with each
other to surrender all their rights to a sovereign for the sake of security. Thenceforth the
sovereign represented all citizens separately, and in a sense they became the authors
of all his acts. They could not, it is true,renounce the right of self-defense, but all the
corporate resistance and contract theories of the past were refuted by this new and
ruthless doctrine of absolute sovereignty.

The personal rule of Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715; took personal charge of the
government of France from 1661) seemed to contemporaries to incarnate absolute
monarchical sovereignty. Indeed the king himself, preparing his memoirs in 1666, said
that kings were absolute sovereigns controlling all the property of their subjects,
whether clerical or lay, for the needs of the state. Elements of the juristic tradition of
sovereignty lay behind this attitude, but the ideology that dominated the reign was that
of the divine right of kings. Its principal spokesman was Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
(1627–1704), bishop of Meaux. His Politiquetirée des propres paroles de
l'écrituresainte (composed 1670, published 1709; Politics drawn from the very words of
Holy Scripture) expounded this doctrine, but also stressed that the king owed a duty to
his subjects and pointed out that his power was absolute but not arbitrary.
In the eighteenth century the concept of absolute sovereignty began to be replaced by a
theory of checks and balances defined by Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La
Brède et de Montesquieu (1689–1755). However, a new kind of sovereignty was
devised by the proto-Romantic writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) in Du
contrat social (1762; The social contract). Rousseau had read Hobbes closely and, like
him, based his doctrine on multiple agreements between primitive people to escape the
state of nature. At the same time Rousseau detested both Hobbes's premises and his
conclusions. Instead of postulating a presocial people involved in a brutal war for
survival, Rousseau believed moral sentiment and a desire for the common good had
moved humankind to renounce the state of nature. Instead of agreements to surrender
individual rights to an absolute ruler, Rousseau proposed primeval agreements to
merge all particular rights in a democratic corporate community whose general will (la
volontégénérale) was the sovereign. Since the general will was always devoted to the
common good, its decisions must always be morally right: "Now, as the sovereign is
formed entirely of the individuals who compose it, it has not, nor could it have, any
interest contrary to theirs. . . . The sovereign by the mere fact that it is, is always all that
it ought to be."

Rousseau's formula bore the shades of earlier theorists of sovereignty. It reflected

Bodin's indivisibility and legislative power, Althusius's communal sovereignty, and even
Pufendorf's "composite moral person whose will is deemed the will of all" (see above).
The problem was that Rousseau had no clear idea of how the general will could be
determined. He did not believe in representation, and he regarded majority decisions
with suspicion. His theory seemed to make sense only in the context of an ancient
Greek city-state society, where the free citizen could realize his full potential. This was
not the way his ideas were applied in the French Revolution, where Jacobin
demagogues declaimed that they alone were the bearers of the nation's general will.

REFERENCE:

J. H. Burns, "Absolutism: the history of an idea," London 1986 (a lecture; clear, short
discussion); 

Julian Franklin, "Sovereignty and the mixed constitution: Bodin and his critics," in J. H.
Burns, ed., with the assistance of Mark Goldie, The Cambridge History of Political
Thought 1450-1700, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, 298-328 (on
Bodin's influence and German replies to him); 
Nicholas Henshall, The myth of absolutism, London 1992 (argues that absolutism did
not exist);

 
James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann Sommerville, 1994; classic British
absolutist texts, esp. the brief True law of Free Monarchies); 
Johann Sommerville, "Absolutism and royalism," in J.H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge
History of Political Thought 1450-1700, Cambridge 1991, 347-73 (overview of
seventeenth-century absolutism, the Divine Right of Kings, etc.).

http://faculty.history.wisc.edu/sommerville/283/283%20session04.htm