Jean Bodin

Jean Bodin (1530-1596) was a French jurist, member of the Parliament of Paris and professor of Law in Toulouse. He is considered by many to be the father of political science because of his theory on sovereignty.

He wrote several books, but the Inquisition condemned most of them because the author demonstrated sympathy for Calvinist theories , and Calvinists, called Huguenots in France were prosecuted by the Catholic church as other Protestant or Reformed Christian cults were in other Catholic countries.

His books divided opinion: some French writers were admiring, while Francis Hutchinson was his detractor, criticising his methodology.

De la République

Jean Bodin's most famous book was his 1576 treatise Six Livres de la République, which described the sovereign as a ruler beyond human law and subject only to the divine or natural law. His definition was that, "Sovereignty is a Republic's absolute and perpetual power". To Bodin, sovereignty is absolute - and so indivisible - although not limitless: it is exercised only in the public sphere, not in the private; it is perpetual, for it doesn't cease as its holder's life ceases (as auctoritas). Sovereignty is no one's property: by essence, it is inalienable. These characteristics would decisively shape the concept of sovereignty. For example, Rousseau's definition of sovereignty, differs only from that of Bodin in that Rousseau believed that the people are the legitimate sovereign. Likewise, it is inalienable - Rousseau condemned the distinction between the origin and the exercise of sovereignty, a distinction upon which constitutional monarchy or representative democracy are founded.

Bodin's ideas in the Six Books on the importance of climate in the shaping of a people's character was also quite influential, finding a prominent place in the work of contemporary Italian thinker Giovanni Botero (1544-1617) and later in French philosopher the Baron de Montesquieu's (1689-1755) climatic determinism .

Finally, Bodin was among the first to recognize the interrelationship between the amount of goods and the amount of money in circulation. The boatloads of silver arriving in Spain from the Bolivian (then Peruvian) mine of Potosí were wreaking inflationary havoc at the time. Bodin laid the foundation for the "Quantity theory of money."

"On Witchcraft" (La Démonomanie des Sorciers)

Bodin recommended torture, even in cases of the disabled and children, to try to confirm guilt of witchcraft. He asserted that not even one witch could be erroneously condemned if the correct procedures were followed, suspicion being enough to torment the accused because rumours concerning witches were almost always true.

External links

Jean Bodin at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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De la République

"On Witchcraft" (La Démonomanie des Sorciers)

External links