Bodin: On Sovereignty (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) Perfect Paperback – 28 May 1992

Part of the more sprawling Les Six Livres de la Republique (1576), On Sovereignty is Jean Bodin's attempt to provide a legal definition for the "absolute and perpetual power" which the inchoate nation-state was becoming able to claim over itself and its peoples.At the time Bodin wrote his Republique, political norms throughout Renaissance Europe were on the move. Ruling parties and dynasties were becoming adept in their use of print, a development of the previous century, and were wealthy, a whole continent wealthier now the Americas were opening their mines and manpower to entrepreneurs willing to take the Atlantic plunge. The long internecine struggles of weak kings over their loose patchworks of feudal domains were beginning to look decidedly more one-sided, and the lucky few who found themselves in power suddenly had a lot more to lose. The strongest monarchies were those who fostered a bureaucracy able to regulate, and tax, and a foreign policy able to influence the emerging mercantile tendencies of their people, and Bodin, trained in jurisprudence, barrister to the Parlement of Paris, was thick in the middle of this seedling legal system.Bodin's solid academic background, following a decade in residence at the University of Toulouse, left him with a sense of the growing irrelevance of medieval Europe's tired reliance on Roman legal precedence, and though the Republique is peppered with Roman case law, his allegiance is always to local legal traditions, and the primacy of French law within the French kingdom. For Bodin, the most relevant factor in any country is its own authority. To be sovereign, he decides, a government must be able to appoint and recall its own magistrates, to ordain and repeal laws, to declare and terminate war, to have the right to hear final appeals, and, should it choose, to overturn a death sentence in the face of prevailing legal custom. To have these powers is to be the power.Now, this power could be equally well held by democracies, aristocracies, or monarchies. Bodin has no favourites here, his issue is sovereignty per se, where it's located, and how it's used in a clear and consistently incontestable manner. "Sovereignty is indivisible" is his catchphrase; the authority in any country being its clear locus of executive, legislative and constituent power. If you divide sovereignty between the parties of a country, if you give different powers to different people, Bodin says, they'll fight like cats in a bag for the rest of it.The problem with this set-up is that governing bodies could then, effectively, become a law unto themselves, with no system of checks and balances to moderate reckless policy. Sovereignty, as a clear legal entity has become here almost more important than the real-politick workings of states at the time, whose securities against tyranny were often implicitly understood rather than clearly held as constitutional norms. One supposes the reason Bodin's work became so popular and influential was this very ability to split opinion, between the ruling bodies on one side, who would develop the theory further towards a divine right of kings, and those on the other, who saw the whole project as a justification for Despotism.Finally then, this volume. Julian Franklin, who edits, translates and introduces does a fair job. His introduction is beefy and steers thankfully clear of extended biography. The only issue for me was that Franklin's something a little too zealous with the translational notes. If you want a narrative sense of what Bodin's chatting you do need to ignore the array of characters, distracting your attention away to the footnotes, listing the petty differences found in other manuscripts, and plough of regardless through the body of the work. Too often the footnotes seem entirely superfluous anyway, for example:" For `all' L107, A5 substitutes, `almost all'."Is there really a need? I understand the Cambridge series is text-book territory, but appendices are there for the finicky details so there's no real need to clutter the page with what for most people are academic tailings. Other than that little rant, I'd say this little work is pretty good context for an understanding of Renaissance monarchy, and the inevitable Enlightenment backlash that was to come.

Kindle edition is illegible.