Bodin, Jean (1529/30–1596)

BODIN, JEAN (1529/30–1596)

BODIN, JEAN (1529/30–1596), French political philosopher. Jean Bodin came from a comfortable family in Angers and received an excellent humanist education. He studied law and taught briefly at the University of Toulouse but was unable to obtain a permanent academic position. He was employed mostly in the royal administration and for a time was secretary to the Duke d'Alençon. A royalist at heart, Bodin was reformist and liberal in fiscal and social policy. He favored religious toleration as the most politique solution to the religious warfare that ravaged France in his time. In 1576, as a deputy of the third at the Estates-General of Blois, he staunchly opposed the grant of new taxation that the crown would have used to prosecute religious war.

Despite his occasional involvement in high politics, Bodin was an indefatigable humanist scholar who sought to encompass and synthesize all the learning of his time. He produced a corpus of extensive treatises on all the main subjects of his day, including the methodology of history, economic theory, comparative public law and politics, witchcraft, comparative religion, natural philosophy, and ethics.

Bodin's Methodus ad Facilem Historiarum Cognitionem (1566; Method for the easy comprehension of history) is a guide to the reading of historians that outlined much of his later writing. But his best-known work and the most influential is his Six livres de la république (1576; Six books of a commonwealth), which is a massive treatise on comparative public law and policy. The first half of the book is the earliest modern treatise on public law. Its organizing principle is Bodin's pioneering analysis and construction of the concept of sovereignty as the juridical condition for the existence of a state. Bodin also argued, mistakenly, that sovereignty was indivisible, as well as absolute and juridically perpetual. He rejected the possibility of a mixed constitution in which supreme authority was divided between two or more agents, and thus he broke with the received opinion that the constitutions of Rome and other classical republics were mixed. On Bodin's reinterpretation they were either pure democracies or pure aristocracies with respect to the juridical locus of supreme authority, although not necessarily in the day-to-day conduct of affairs.

Most politically significant of all Bodin's revisions of received traditions, however, was his interpretation of the French constitution as a strictly absolute monarchy. He had once admitted and even approved at least some juridical limits on the king. But he was finally driven to absolutism not only by the logic of his position but by his deep-seated fears of anarchy. Bodin had never admitted the right of a people to resist a tyrant and thought, mistakenly, that he could exclude that right juridically by denying the people any authoritative role in government.

Appearances notwithstanding, his reformist views on taxation were technically consistent with his stand on nonresistance. Although he held that all kings, including the French, ordinarily required the consent of the Estates-General for levying new taxation, this was not a limitation that the people had imposed or could legally enforce. It followed directly from the law of nature by which the ruler was responsible to God alone. The need for consent, moreover, did not apply in emergencies, and with Bodin's followers it was reduced to a mere counsel of wise governance.

Perhaps the most interesting of Bodin's works today is his Colloquium Heptaplomeres de Rerum Sublimium Arcanis Abditis (Colloquium of the seven about secrets of the sublime), which was written around 1588. Seven interlocutors, meeting in Venice, debated their competing claims as to the true religion and finally agreed to disagree in friendship. So heretical did this seem to Bodin himself and to succeeding generations who knew of it that it was not published until the middle of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the Colloquium is remarkable even now. In an arresting anticipation of modern religious pluralism, Bodin argued in effect that worship in any of the major religions was pleasing to God. Underlying all of them was a Neoplatonic natural religion of which all were variations that arose from adaptations to different climates and political circumstances. Each of Bodin's seven interlocutors represented a different religious viewpoint, and the inconclusive debate among them served to show that no positive system could sustain its claims to exclusive truth against the others. At times, however, Bodin seemed to be suggesting that Judaism is the oldest and the best. And it may well be that some form of philosophic Judaism was the ultimate outcome of Bodin's lifelong search for the true religion. The Paradoxon (1596), a treatise on ethics that was among Bodin's last endeavors, clearly indicates that Bodin, greatly influenced by the thought of Philo of Alexandria, had turned to a kind of Judaism. Bodin was buried as a Catholic, in accordance with his wishes. But many of his books were placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in a series of steps beginning in 1596.

Yet another contribution to modern thought was Bodin's brilliant 1568 essay, titled Résponses au paradoxes du sieur de Malestroict, on the great European price inflation of the time. It was caused, he argued, not by debasement of the coinage, as was widely thought, but by the importation of bullion from America that lowered the value of gold and silver. This was the first application of the quantity theory of money. Another contribution was less enduring. Anticipating Montesquieu, Bodin tried to correlate climate and national character to illumine not only political attitudes but religious tendencies as well.

Perhaps the least known of Bodin's works is his Theatrum Naturae (1596; The theater of nature), which is an encyclopedic collection of facts, observations, and principles of nature in the style of late Renaissance science. Its premodern view of nature supports a natural theology purporting to show God's concern for humanity in the natural order.

There are dark spots in Bodin's writing, of which his book on the detection and punishment of witches and warlocks (La démonomanie des sorciers), published in 1580, is a notorious example. But such superstitions of the time apart, his universal synthesis of knowledge, although in large part outdated, was a huge intellectual accomplishment.

See also Absolutism ; Authority, Concept of ; Constitutionalism ; Natural Law ; Neoplatonism ; Political Philosophy ; Resistance, Theory of.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Bodin, Jean. Colloquium of the Seven about Secrets of the Sublime. Translated with an introduction and notes by Marion Leathers Daniels Kuntz. Princeton, 1975. Translation of Colloquium Heptaplomeres de Rerum Sublimium Arcanis Abditis (1593).

——. Method for the Easy Comprehension of History. Translated by Beatrice Reynolds. New York, 1945. Translation of Methodus ad Facilem Historiarum Cognitionem (1566).

——. On Sovereignty: Four Chapters from the Six Books of the Commonwealth. Translated and edited by Julian H. Franklin. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1992.

——. The Six Books of a Commonweale. Edited and translated with an introduction and notes by Kenneth Douglas McRae. Cambridge, Mass., 1962. Translation of Les six livres de la république (1576) together with variations from De Republica Libri Sex (1586). This is the only complete translation of Bodin's chief work on politics. It is a reproduction of the Richard Knolles translation, which is archaic and difficult to read at times. But McRae's variations and excellent annotations are invaluable.

Secondary Sources

Blair, Ann. The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science. Princeton, 1997. An outstanding study of a pre-Baconian and pre-Cartesian philosopher of nature.

Denzer, Horst, ed. Verhandlungen der internationalen Bodin Tagung in München. Munich, 1973. Contains eight articles in English on various aspects of Bodin's thought.

Franklin, Julian H. Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory. Cambridge, U.K., 1973.

Rose, Paul Lawrence. Bodin and the Great God of Nature: The Moral and Religious Universe of a Judaiser. Geneva, 1980.

Julian H. Franklin