Everything about Jean Bodin totally explained
Jean Bodin (
1530–
1596) was a French
jurist and
political philosopher, member of the
Parlement (not to be confused with the English
Parliament) of
Paris and professor of Law in
Toulouse. He is best known for his theory of
sovereignty.
Bodin lived during the
Reformation, writing against the background of religious and civil conflict—particularly that, in his native France, between the (Calvinist)
Huguenots and the state-supported
Catholic Church. He wrote several books, most of which were condemned by the
Inquisition for the author's apparent sympathy with
Calvinist theories.
His books divided opinion: some French writers were full of praise, while the later Scottish philosopher,
Francis Hutchinson was his detractor, criticising his methodology.
De la République
Jean Bodin's most famous work was written in
1576. The ideas in the
Six Books on the State (or
Les Six livres de la République) 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.
His Classical definition of sovereignty is: “la puissance absolue et perpetuelle d’une Republique” (Sovereignty is that absolute and perpetual power vested in a commonwealth). His main ideas about sovereignty are found in chapter VIII and X of Book I.
Bodin was also one of the first to recognize the
resource curse. In "Six Books of a Commonwealth," he noted that "men of a fat and fertile soil are most commonly effeminate and cowards; whereas contrariwise a barren country makes men temperate by necessity, and by consequence careful, vigilant, and industrious."
Historian
In France, Bodin was most noted as a historian in his
Method for the Easy Understanding of History. He writes, "Of history, that is, the true narration of things, there are three kinds: human, natural and divine." As a historic politician, Bodin contributed to the restoration of France as a strong
nation-state.
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. Some scholars have attributed Bodin´s attitude towards so-called witches as part of a populationist strategy typical for mercantilism.
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