Jean Bodin

• He was a French humanist philosopher, a jurist and one of the

most prominent political thinkers of the sixteenth century.
• His reputation is largely based on his account of sovereignty
which he formulated in the Six Books of the Commonwealth
• He was one of the first men to have opposed slavery
• Through his works, he created an effective counter-attack
against the monarchomach position that invoked “popular
sovereignty”
Bodin’s concept of sovereignty
• His classical definition of sovereignty is “the perpetual and absolute
power of a Republic”
• Sovereignty and its defining marks or attributes are indivisible, and
supreme power within the commonwealth must necessarily be
concentrated on a single person or group of persons.
• Bodin argues that the first prerogative of a sovereign ruler is to give
law to subjects without the consent of any other individual.
Bodin’s definition of law
• Bodin writes that there is a great difference between law and right.
Law is the command of a sovereign prince, that makes use of his
power, while right implies that which is equitable. A right connotes
something with a normative content; law, on the other hand, has no
moral content or normative implications.
Hugo Grotius
• He was a Dutch humanist and jurist whose philosophy of natural law
had a major impact on the development of seventeenth century
political thought.
• Valorized by contemporary international theorists as the father of
international law, his work on sovereignty, international rights of
commerce and the norms of just war continue to inform theories of
the international legal order.
Grotius on sovereignty and imperialism
• Connecting the political and international thought of Grotius is his
conception of sovereignty, the supreme right of governing . The mark of
the sovereign power is that it “cannot be made void by any other
human will”.
• The guiding idea in Grotius’ treatment of sovereignty, as with his
treatment of rights generally, is that systems of rights are radically
alterable through the ways people choose to dispose of those rights.
• In defending the legitimacy of diverse forms of political authority, he is
rejecting the principle behind those forms of imperialism that seek to
impose a more enlightened form of rule for the good of the governed.
 Grotius’ Freedom of the Seas
• In this book, he formulated the new principle that the sea was international
territory and all nations were free to use it for seafaring trade.
• From this premise, Grotius argued that this self-evident and immutable right
to travel and to trade required (1) a right of innocent passage over land, and
(2) a similar right of innocent passage at sea. The sea, however, was more like
air than land, and was, as opposed to land, common property of all:
• “The air belongs to this class of things for two reasons. First, it is not
susceptible of occupation; and second its common use is destined for all men.
For the same reasons the sea is common to all, because it is so limitless that it
cannot become a possession of any one, and because it is adapted for the use
of all, whether we consider it from the point of view of navigation or of
fisheries.”
Samuel von Pufendorf
• He was a German jurist and historian, best known for his defense of
the idea of natural law.
• Among his achievements are his commentaries and revisions of the
natural law theories of Thomas Hobbes and Hugo Grotius.
• His political concepts are part of the cultural background of the
American Revolution. Pufendorf is seen as an important precursor of
Enlightenment in Germany.
Pufendorf’s Natural Law
• He took up the theories of natural law proposed by Grotius and
sought to complete them by means of the doctrines of Hobbes and of
his own ideas. His first important point was that natural law does not
extend beyond the limits of this life and that it confines itself to
regulating external acts.
Pufendorf on forms of state, absolute and
limited sovereignty
• States where sovereignty is unified – whatever be their form
(monarchy, aristocracy, democracy) – are called regular, and those
where it is divided irregular.
• Contra Hobbes, Pufendorf allows that supreme sovereignty may be
either absolute or limited.
• The former obtains where a sovereign accepts his authority with no
conditions attached, the latter where citizens’ submission depends on
the sovereign’s initial acceptance of certain terms, such as an existing
state’s fundamental laws.