Jean Bodin

Bodin, Jean (1529/30–96)

Jean Bodin was one of the great universal scholars of the later Renaissance. Despite political distractions, he made major contributions to historiography and the philosophy of history, economic theory, public law and comparative public policy, the sociology of institutions, as well as to religious philosophy, comparative religion and natural philosophy. Among his most celebrated achievements are his theory of sovereignty, which introduced a new dimension to the study of public law, and his Neoplatonist religion, which opened new perspectives on universalism and religious toleration.

Many of these intellectual positions, moreover, were responses, at least in part, to great political issues of the time. Against doctrines of popular sovereignty and the right of resistance put forward in the course of the religious wars, Bodin sought to show that the king of France was absolute. Against the widespread corruption and laxity that weakened and undermined the monarchy, he argued for administrative reform. And against the party that pressed the king to impose religious uniformity, he cautiously supported religious toleration. In all these respects Bodin’s thought helped to inform the policies of the early Bourbon dynasty esatblished by Henry IV.

1 Life

Bodin was born in Angers, France, into a modestly successful middle-class family. Obtaining an excellent humanist education in his youth, he was to become in the course of his career one of the most outstanding humanist scholars of his age. His erudition was formidable in scope as well as depth, and his many publications include important contributions to almost every field of learning pursued by his contemporaries.

Bodin’s professional training was in law which he studied at the University of Toulouse during the 1550s. Unable to secure a regular faculty position, he embarked on a public career as a barrister in the Parlement of Paris. However, at no point in his career did he retreat from the encyclopedic programme of research and writing that he had projected in his early years. The success of his earlier publications on history (1566), public finance (1568), and public law and policy (1576) gave him access as adviser and confidant to high political circles in and around the royal court. In the 1570s he was often a dinner companion of Henry III, and he became counsellor to Henry’s ambitious younger brother, the Duke d’Alençon. But in 1576, as a deputy to the Estates General of Blois, Bodin took a public-spirited if impolitic stand against requests for new taxation. He was thus at odds with Henry’s policy and no longer enjoyed royal favour. The death of d’Alençon in 1584, marked the end of Bodin’s involvement in high politics. He moved from Paris to Laon where he was a royal magistrate from 1587 until his death in 1596.

These last years were a time of trouble for Bodin. The French Religious Wars, which had gone on intermittently since 1562, were now entering a climactic phase. With the assassination of Henry III in 1589, a savage struggle had broken out over the claims to succession of the Protestant Henry of Navarre (King Henry IV). Large parts of France, including Laon, came under the control of the militantly revolutionary Catholic League, whose programme and doctrine contradicted Bodin’s long-standing principles of legitimacy, non-resistance and religious tolerance. Yet Bodin, like many other royalist magistrates of the time, openly collaborated with the League. He sought to justify his course by mystical reflections on the preordained doom of the ruling dynasty. But he seems to have been driven by fears not only for his office and his property, but perhaps for his life as well; now, as in the past, he was under suspicion of heresy. He stood publicly for Navarre only in 1594 when the forces of the latter were victorious.

These troubles notwithstanding, Bodin never ceased to pursue his vast programme of scholarly and philosophic research. Between 1588 and his death he produced two short works on ethics, a major treatise on religion and a system of natural philosophy. His writings make it clear that Bodin’s religion was a Judaizing Neoplatonism. But outwardly at least he remained within the church, and on his death he was buried as a Catholic in accordance with his will.

 2 Public law – the theory of sovereignty

Bodin’s most celebrated work is his Les six livres de la république (The Six Books of a Commonwealth) (1576), an encyclopedic treatise of public law and policy that appeared in 1576. The theory of sovereignty, which provides its framework, was a major event in the development of European political thought. Bodin’s precise definition of supreme authority, his determination of its scope and his analysis of the functions it logically entailed helped to turn public law into a scientific discipline. With Bodin and his followers (especially in Germany), the various jurisdictions of a state could be systematically ordered with respect to an ultimate centre of authority. And his elaboration of the implications of sovereignty through a vast synthesis of comparative public law helped to launch a whole new literary genre.

Bodin’s doctrine of sovereignty, however, was seriously flawed by his erroneous views on the indivisibility of sovereignty. He believed that all the powers of the state had ultimately to be concentrated in a single individual or group. This was presented not only as a recommendation of political prudence but as the analytic condition of a coherent and coordinated legal system. Bodin could thus conclude that a mixed constitution, in which the prerogatives of sovereignty were shared or separated, was logically impossible. He therefore failed to see that shared or separated powers produced a compound sovereign, the components of which were coordinated by an underlying basic norm, or rule of recognition, accepted by the general community. Sovereignty, for Bodin, was always that of a ruler. What he needed, but could not imagine, was some notion of constituent authority distinct from the ordinary power of a government. (see Constitutionalism §1; Sovereignty §§1, 3)

3 Public law – the French monarchy and absolutism

Bodin’s rejection of the mixed constitution would ultimately lead him to an absolutist interpretation of the French and other monarchies of Western Europe. (see Absolutism §§2–3). This was not his original intention, and in his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Method for the Easy Comprehension of History) (1566), he worked with a notion of limited supremacy. Ten years later, however, he had come to the conclusion that sovereign authority was absolute as well as indivisible. This seems to have resulted in part from further reflections on the logic of undivided power and in part from his deep fears of imminent anarchy arising from challenges to royal authority in the renewed religious wars. In the République Bodin developed an absolutist interpretation of the French kingship as well as of the Spanish and the English, which supplied a conservative reply to existing doctrines of resistance. Yet it must be emphasized that Bodin was no friend of arbitrary governance. Although a proper king was absolute juridically, prudence and decency required that he seek the advice of the Estates and respect the judgments of the Parlements. The king, moreover, was limited, morally at least, by the law of nature as well as by certain fundamental laws on the organization of the crown and its domain (see Natural Law). The law of nature, furthermore, was rigorously interpreted, and it even prohibited, at least in Bodin’s reasoning, the imposition of new taxes without consent. The critical point for him politically was that a king’s obligation to the law of nature was owed to God alone. Resistance by subjects was thus excluded, for according to contemporary notions, resistance to an authority that was absolute in the sense of not responsible to human agents was forbidden by the law of God.

4 Other contributions to social theory

Bodin’s account of sovereignty and public law was only one of many pioneering contributions to social theory. His Methodus of 1566, which was a guide to the profitable study of universal history, included a critical method for evaluating historical statements, a system of universal chronology and a theory of progress in the arts and sciences, as well as an extensive preliminary exposition of his theory of public law. And both the République and the Methodus contain a long chapter, clearly anticipating Montesquieu, on how climate and geography shape the social and political temperament of nations. In La response de Jean Bodin à M. de Malestroit (The Response of Jean Bodin to the Paradoxes of M. Malestroit) (1568), Bodin explained the price revolution of the sixteenth century as the result of the sudden influx of precious metals from America. Although anticipated somewhat by Copernicus, he was the first to arrive at a clear explanation of the quantity theory of money. His thesis, furthermore, was illustrated and proven by a reconstruction of the historical movement of French prices, which was a model of sophisticated economic historiography. And his findings on the movements of bullion and goods across national boundaries led him to shrewd observations on the international division of labour.

5 Religious thought

Bodin’s religious thought was also strikingly bold and highly influential. His main work on religion, the Colloquium heptaplomeres de rerum sublimium arcanis abditis (Colloquium of the Seven about Secrets of the Sublime), was to seem scandalously freethinking to contemporaries. Probably written around 1593, Bodin left it in manuscript form and wanted it burned upon his death. It survived in manuscript and obtained underground circulation among scholars until it was finally published in the nineteenth century.

Bodin seems to have resolved his lifelong search for religious truth with a theistic form of Neoplatonism (see Neoplatonism §5). Neoplatonic religiosity had strong appeal to Renaissance intellectuals. But Bodin’s version is distinctive, however, in that it is Judaized and very strictly unitarian. Speculative reason teaches us that God exists, that he orders the cosmos by his angels and demons, and that he reveals his will for humankind and his purposes in history by inspiring his prophets. Thus disciplined, speculative reason conducts humans to their highest good, which consists of a kind of mystic unity with God. As Bodin describes it in the Paradoxon (The Paradox of Jean Bodin) (1596a), this unity is not, and cannot be, a participation in divinity, or even an active form of contemplation. It is rather a passive opening to God, by way of contemplation, that allows God’s light to enter and illuminate the soul. Properly ordered, all aspects of life, both intellectual and moral, are subordinated to this goal. The science of nature, which Bodin treats in his Universae naturae theatrum (Theatre of Nature in its Entirety) (1596b), teaches the wonders and beauties of God’s creation. Contemplative wisdom, however, leads beyond science in bringing us closer to God and culminates in illumination, the content of which, for those chosen to receive it, is the gift of prophetic powers.

Although this approach to God is possible in all religions, Judaism is held to be the oldest and truest, and the revelations of its prophets and sages are said to be the best. Christianity is portrayed as flawed, not only for its trinitarianism but also for its doctrine of original sin and the need for a saviour. Nevertheless, it is not the purpose of the Colloquium heptaplomeres to prove the claims of any one of the revealed religions. All the interlocutors – each representing a different theological position – agree that the differences among them cannot be resolved by argument, that sincere worship in any of the positive religions is pleasing to God, and that they will agree to disagree in the tolerant spirit of Venice, which is the imagined locale of the colloquium.

With respect to public policy, Bodin’s recommendations, although still liberal for the time, are more cautious and politically aware. Where religious uniformity existed, it was to be preserved no matter what its form, since politico-religious factionalism was among the worst of evils. Since a state religion would not be unacceptable to God, the philosopher could observe it outwardly, while cultivating truth in private. But forced conversions are always to be shunned, and where a religious minority has become numerous, limited toleration is the prudent course.

Bodin’s religious mysticism also had its darker side. He believed in astrology and numerology and attempted to apply both to political science. Darker still was his all too influential book, De la démonomanie des sorciers (On The Demon-mania of Witches) (1580), on the detection and punishment of witches. Nevertheless, these deviations into superstition were not uncommon in the Renaissance and ought not to obscure the fact that Bodin’s religious thought was a significant moment in the development of universalism and religious toleration. This body of thought, together with his contributions to political and social theory, entitle him to be regarded as one of the foremost thinkers of his time.