Bodin, Jean
Bodin, Jean
Jean Bodin (1529 or 1530–1596), French jurist and polyhistor, was born into a substantial and well-connected middle-class family of Angers. He managed to acquire an excellent humanist education at Paris in the course of preparing for the priesthood—a career that ended in his teens, for reasons still obscure, when the Carmelite order released him from his vows. In the 1550s he studied civil law at the University of Toulouse and apparently hoped for a professorship. Ultimately despairing of this goal and unsuccessful also in his effort to promote a humanist college in the city of Toulouse, he returned as an advocate to Paris, where he had a moderately successful career in politics. In the late 1560s he was entrusted by the crown with several special missions of an administrative nature. In 1576 he appeared in the Estates-General at Blois as a deputy of the Third Estate from Vermandois and became, at some cost to his ambitions, a highly influential critic of royal fiscal policies. And from 1571 until the death of his patron in 1584 he served in the household staff of the duke of Alençon, an ambitious member of the royal family, in which post he was privy to much of the high intrigue and diplomacy of the time. Bodin was not, however, a very skillful politician and failed to achieve what at one time he most coveted, a high position in the royal household. He ended his career as procurer du roi for Laon.
On the main political issue of his time, the demand for religious toleration by a large and powerful Protestant minority, Bodin stood with the party of the Politiques, who sought to compromise the issue of religious uniformity in the interest of political unity, and were therefore bitterly resented by the party of militant Catholics united in the Catholic League. In the recurring civil warfare, which entered its final phase in 1588, it was often extremely dangerous to hold such views as Bodin’s in public and, under heavy pressure at Laon, he temporarily collaborated with the League. There was, however, a considerable element of boldness in Bodin’s character that comes out most strongly in his intellectual endeavors. After a series of spiritual crises, and amid recurrent charges of heresy, he gradually worked out a highly unorthodox religious syncretism of his own, although he outwardly remained a Catholic. This religicus syncretism, furthermore, was but one aspect of an encyclopedic synthesis of all existing knowledge, which Bodin pursued with unflagging scholarly devotion.
Jurisprudence and public law. Bodin’s main contributions to the development of social science were in jurisprudence and public law. During the sixteenth century the intellectual authority of Roman law, more or less unchallenged in the Middle Ages, had been increasingly undermined by humanist criticisms of its relevance and logical arrangement. Among sixteenth-century jurists committed to the unification of French law there was an influential party, which preferred an independently created code to direct reception of the Roman law. Bodin was a member of this group, and at one point in his career his highest ambition was to construct a universal jurisprudence through a comparison and synthesis of “the laws of all of the most famous commonwealths” in order “to derive the best variety.” In his Six livres de la république (Six Bookes of a Commonweale, 1576), this program is actually carried out for what is roughly the domain of public law. Bodin first attempted to find the universal and “necessary” principles of public order in those legal elements that “all or the better part” of peoples have in common. He then went on to classify and illustrate the different types of commonwealths and states encountered in history, producing what amounts to a comprehensive system of comparative public law. His final objective was to show which particular legislative and governmental policies are best adapted to the peculiar problems of each type of state and how all of these policies together should be adapted to a people’s “natural temperament,” which he attributed to the strong, but not determining, influence of climate and other geographic factors. This entire work is carried out with encyclopedic erudition and a profound, if not always fully realized, desire for system. It represents, therefore, a definite break with the exegetic jurisprudence of the Middle Ages and the adoption of a critical method. Bodin’s historical universalism points toward the rationalist universalism of seventeenth-century natural law; and his comparative and sociological approach clearly, and often strikingly, anticipates various eighteenth-century developments.
The central theme in Bodin’s doctrine of the state is the need, suggested by the disorders of his time, for complete concentration and centralization of political authority. Through a great number of historical examples he attempted to show that in every important and enduring commonwealth all legislative and executive functions are subordinate to some single center. This doctrine of the state questions the classical wisdom of the mixed constitution, at that time one of the most influential notions in political science. In order to demonstrate that famous “mixed” constitutions, such as those of ancient Rome and modern Venice, were in fact instances of concentration, Bodin introduced an ingenious and influential distinction between the form of state and the form of government, corresponding to a distinction between the ownership and the exercise of power. On this basis he was able to argue, with some degree of plausibility, that the Roman Empire was really a democracy governed aristocratically and that Venice was really an aristocracy with certain democratic features in its government.
Bodin did not deny that the old idea of “mixture” contained an important principle of policy when properly interpreted and instituted, not as a division in the ownership of power but as a balancing of aristocratic and popular interests in the arrangement of government and the distribution of rewards and punishments. And he argued that this balance in the exercise of power is most readily achieved in monarchies, where the ultimate owner of power can stand apart from the social interests to be harmonized. Bodin’s critique and reinterpretation of the mixed state turns out, then, to be a highly sophisticated defense of absolute yet moderate monarchy, and it was to play an important role in the ideological conflicts of the old regime.
For Bodin, however, the fundamental condition of stability is that expressed in his celebrated principle of sovereignty, which holds that in every stable commonwealth there must exist a supreme or sovereign authority vested in some single individual or group. A sovereign authority is one whose power is “absolute and perpetual.” And since power is, in Bodin’s usage, absolute when it is unlimited in jurisdiction and perpetual when it is not held in trust for someone else, a sovereign authority is a group or person endowed with an intrinsic and inalienable right to exercise, or supervise the exercise of, all the powers that a government may legitimately claim. The absolutism of the sovereign, therefore, is but a guarantee of the concentration and unity of government and does not necessarily imply unlimited power over the person or property of subjects. Indeed, Bodin, in accord with medieval precedent, very strenuously insisted that the rights of sovereignty are restricted by natural law as well as other claims of the community. And he admitted that a subject may legitimately refuse to obey an unjust order of the sovereign, although he rejected any general right of active revolution. If Bodin’s position on these issues is not always lucidly worked out, it is at least in part because he was less concerned with the moral grounds of obligation than with the legal conditions of effective governance.
Economic policy. On specific points of public policy most of Bodin’s recommendations are mere bits of tactical wisdom in the style of Machiavelli, but there are many that have more far-reaching theoretical implications. In economic policy Bodin was an enlightened mercantilist who located the real wealth of a country not in bullion but in industry and natural resources. This distinction between real and money values is theoretically grounded in the quantity theory of money, which, despite anticipations by Copernicus, is fully developed only with Bodin. In his Réponse aux paradoxes de M. de Malestroit (1568), Bodin elaborately argued that the price inflation of his age was caused not by debasement of the coinage, a hypothesis advanced by Malestroit, but by the sudden increase in the supply of precious metals. This essay may also be regarded as a pioneering monograph in scientific social history, for Bodin, with great ingenuity, used economic records to reconstruct the movement of prices.
Religious policy. In religious policy Bodin recommended a strictly political approach to the religious conflicts of the time. Outward uniformity of worship should be enforced wherever possible, but toleration should be granted wherever a religious minority is too strong to be repressed conveniently. More interesting than these recommendations is Bodin’s attempt to supply a theological foundation for this “politique” solution. In his Colloquium heptaplomeres (1588a), a series of conversations on the nature of the true religion between a proponent of natural religion, an apologist for paganism, a Jew, a Turk, a Catholic, a Lutheran, and a Zwinglian—the following conclusions, among others, are either stated or implied: that the various positive religions are degenerations of an original natural religion still known to speculative reason; that the positive religions were designed to counteract the ignorance and irrationality of the masses by supplying rituals and dogma adapted to circumstances and temperaments of different peoples; and that any one of the positive forms of worship is sufficient for salvation, because all that God demands is the attitude of piety as such. Theological truth and political expediency can therefore never be in conflict, since a double standard in religion is decreed by providence itself. It may also be noted that Bodin’s position, although not unique, was especially radical for its time in that it contained an elaborate refutation of Christianity by the spokesman for Judaism, which, Bodin implies, is the purest of the positive religions. The Colloquium heptaplomeres may also be regarded as one of the earliest comparative treatments of religion. For obvious reasons the work was never published by Bodin, but it was known to scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in manuscript copies. The first complete published version did not appear until 1857, and a truly definitive edition is wanting even now.
Universal history. Dedicated as he was to a comparative understanding of social institutions, Bodin was convinced that the study of universal history was a prime requirement of education and his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Method for the Easy Comprehension of History) was a sort of guidebook for prospective students. Among other things there is a chapter on evaluating historians that makes an important contribution to the emergence in this period of a methodology of historical criticism. In the seventh chapter there are two influential polemical essays defending what might be called a naturalistic view of historical change: one is a devastating refutation of a medieval periodization of history, based on a biblical prophecy, into four world empires, of which the Germano–Roman was supposed to be the last; and the other is a critique of the idea of a golden age and of the superiority of the ancients to the moderns, in which Bodin begins to enunciate a theory of cumulative progress in the arts and sciences.
Bodin’s ultimate objective was a synthesis, broadly Neoplatonic in tone, of the entire realm of human knowledge; and the corpus of his writings covers not only what would now be called the social science disciplines, but natural philosophy, demonology, astrology, and numerology as well. The works on these latter topics are among his least enduring, and it may be said in general that Bodin, like the other encyclopedists of the period, was frequently loose and hasty in his “syntheses” and often lacked the critical resources to avoid superstition and credulity. But with all this, his social thought is so creative that he must be regarded as a central figure in the development of modern social science.
Julian H. Franklin
[For the historical context of Bodin’s work, seeConstitutions and constitutionalism; Sovereignty; State; and the biographies ofMachiavelli; Marsilius. For discussion of the subsequent development of his ideas, see the biography ofMontesquieu.]
WORKS BY BODIN
(1559–1566) 1951 Oeuvres philosophiques. Edited and translated by Pierre Mesnard. Corpus général des philosophes français, auteurs modernes, Vol. 3. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ? Text is in both Latin and French. This is the first volume—containing works up through 1566—of a projected series that may eventually include critical editions of the Six livres de la république and the Colloquium heptaplomeres, both of which are badly needed.
(1566) 1945 Method for the Easy Comprehension of History. Records of Civilization, Sources and Studies, No. 37. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. ? First published in Latin as Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem.
(1568) 1932 La vie chère au XVIe siècle: La response de Jean Bodin à M. de Malestroit. Edited by Henri Hauser. Paris: Colin. ? A new edition of Réponse aux paradoxes de M. de Malestroit.
(1568) 1946 The Response of Jean Bodin to the Paradoxes of Malestroit, and the Paradoxes. Chevy Chase, Md.: Century Dollar Press. ? A limited edition, translated from the second French edition.
(1576) 1962 The Six Bookes of a Commonweale. Edited by Kenneth D. McRae. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. ? A facsimile reprint of the English translation of 1606, corrected and supplemented in the light of a new comparison with the French and Latin texts.
(1588a) 1857 Colloquium heptaplomeres de rerum sublimium arcanis abditis. Edited by Ludov Noack. Schwerin (Germany).
(1588b) 1914 Colloque de Jean Bodin: Des secrets cachez des choses sublimes entre sept sçauans qui sont de differens sentimens (traduction français du “Colloquium heptaplomeres”). Selected and edited by Roger Chauviré. Paris: Sirey. ? Contains selections from a French translation of the Colloquium heptaplomeres made shortly after Bodin’s death. It is probably a more accurate version of the lost original than the Latin text edited by Noack. However, Noack’s is the only complete version.
WORKS ABOUT BODIN
Full-length works that attempt to give a reasonably comprehensive account of Bodin’s political and social thought are Baudrillart 1853; Chauviré 1914; and Garosci 1934. For an excellent account of his political doctrine, see Mesnard 1951a; and for a brief survey, see Allen 1928. Two biographical sketches that take full account of recent findings can be found in McRae 1962 and Mesnard 1951b.
Allen, John W. (1928) 1957 A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century. London: Methuen.
Baudrillart, Henri J. L. 1853 J. Bodin et son temps: Tableau des théories politiques et des idées économiques au seizième siècle. Paris: Guillaumin.
Brown, John L. 1939 The Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem of Jean Bodin: A Critical Study. Washington: Catholic Univ. of America Press.
ChauvirÉ, Roger 1914 Jean Bodin: Auteur de La république. La Flèche (France): Besnier.
Dilthey, Wilhelm (1914) 1957 Der religiös–universale Theismus: Bodins Vergleichung der Religionen. Pages 145–153 in Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften. Volume 2: Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation; Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Religion. Stuttgart and Göttingen (Germany): Teubner.
Franklin, Julian H. 1963 Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
Garosci, Aldo 1934 Jean Bodin: Politica e diritto nel rinascimento francese. Milan: Corticelli.
Hauser, Henri (editor) 1932 Introduction. In Jean Bodin, La vie chère au XVIe siècle: La response de Jean Bodin à M. de Malestroit. Paris: Colin.
McRae, Kenneth D. (editor) 1962 Introduction. In Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Commonweale. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.
Mesnard, Pierre 1929 La pensée religieuse de Bodin. Revue du seizième siècle 16:77–121.
Mesnard, Pierre (1951a) 1952 La république de Jean Bodin. Book 5, pages 473–546 in Pierre Mesnard, L’essor de la philosophic politique au XVIesiècle. 2d ed., rev. Paris: Vrin.
Mesnard, Pierre (editor) 1951b Vers un portrait de Jean Bodin. Introduction in Jean Bodin, Oeuvres philosophiques. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Moreau-Reibel, Jean 1933 Jean Bodin et le droit public comparé dans ses rapports avec la philosophie de l’histoire. Paris: Vrin.
Reynolds, Beatrice 1931 Proponents of Limited Monarchy in Sixteenth Century France: Francis Hotman and Jean Bodin. Columbia University Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, No. 334. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
Sabine, George H. 1931 The Colloquium heptaplomeres of Jean Bodin. Pages 271–309 in Persecution and Liberty: Essays in Honor of George Lincoln Burr. New York: Century.