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11 - Jean Bodin

(c.1529/1530–1596)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2019

By
Daniel Lee
Edited by
Olivier Descamps  and
Rafael Domingo
Olivier Descamps
Affiliation:
Pantheon-Assas University, Paris
Rafael Domingo
Affiliation:
Emory University, Atlanta
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Summary

The chapter summarizes the remarkable life and thought of Jean Bodin (c. 1529/30–1596), paying particular attention to his legal education in Toulouse and his service to the government of the Valois monarchy during the period of the French Wars of Religion. The chapter then proceeds to discuss major features of Bodin’s thought, including his outline of jurisprudence in the Juris Universi Distributio, his comparative history of states in the Methodus ad Facilem Historiarum Cognitionem, and his theory of the sovereign state in the Six Livres de la République. Particular attention is paid to Bodin’s theory of legislation to explain his doctrine that sovereign authorities are absolute or legibus soluti.Since positive legislation, according to Bodin, is reducible to a sovereign command, it is necessary to treat sovereigns as soluti – immune to the obligatory binding effects of their own legislation. The chapter concludes with a brief look at Bodin’s later writings on natural philosophy and religion, which reveal a theology centered on an interventionist God as a legislator of natural law.
Type
Chapter
Information
Great Christian Jurists in French History , pp. 191 - 209
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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References

Recommended Reading

Becker, Anna. “Jean Bodin on Oeconomics and Politics.” History of European Ideas 40 (2014): 135–54.Google Scholar
Blair, Ann. Theater of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Denzer, Horst, edn. Jean Bodin: Verhandlungen der Internationalen Bodin Tagung in München. Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1973.Google Scholar
Franklin, Julian. Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973.Google Scholar
Giesey, Ralph. “Medieval Jurisprudence in Bodin’s Concept of Sovereignty.” In Denzer, Jean Bodin: Verhandlungen der Internationalen Bodin Tagung in München, 167–86.Google Scholar
Kelley, Donald. “The Development and Context of Bodin’s Method.” In Denzer, Jean Bodin: Verhandlungen der Internationalen Bodin Tagung in München, 123–50.Google Scholar
Lee, Daniel. Popular Sovereignty in Early Modern Constitutional Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Lee, Daniel. “Unmaking Law: Jean Bodin on Law, Equity, and Legal Change.” History of Political Thought 39, no. 2 (2018): 269–96.Google Scholar
Lloyd, Howell. Jean Bodin, “This Pre-eminent Man of France”: An Intellectual Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.Google Scholar
Lloyd, Howell. edn. The Reception of Bodin. Leiden: Brill, 2013.Google Scholar
McCuaig, William. Carlo Sigonio: The Changing World of the Late Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989/2016.Google Scholar
Parker, David. “Law, Society and the State in the Thought of Jean Bodin.” History of Political Thought 2 (1981): 253–85.Google Scholar
Rose, Paul Lawrence. Jean Bodin and the Great God of Nature: The Moral and Religious Universe of a Judaiser. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1980.Google Scholar
Salmon, J. H. M. “The Legacy of Jean Bodin: Absolutism, Populism or Constitutionalism.” History of Political Thought 17 (1996): 500–22.Google Scholar
Tuck, Richard. The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.Google Scholar

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