1st Year B.A. LL. B (Div.

-D and E) – Semester-III (2022)

1st -Internal Assessment

Political Science II
Critical Review of Jean Bodin

NAME: VAIBHAVI AGRAWAL, SANAYA INDRANEEL MUJGULE

DIVISION: D

PRN: 21010125386, 21010125384

COURSE: B.A. LL.B. (HONS.)

BATCH: 2021-2026
INTRODUCTION
Jean Bodin was a leading political theorist of the sixteenth century in addition to practising
law, economics, natural philosophy, and history. His magnum opus, The Six Books of the
Commonwealth, summarises every major political and legal principle developed in France
throughout the Renaissance. The early-modern European humanist tradition that he
exemplifies with his Method for the Simple Understanding of History is known as the Ars
Historica. After receiving a solid foundation in the Catholic religion as a young man, Bodin
remained a devout member of the Church until the day he passed away. Strongly devout, he
requested burial in a Catholic church in a bequest dated June 7, 1596.

Even yet, he sometimes expressed antipapal views and criticised church leadership when he
was a middle-aged man. The evidence has led his biographers to classify him as a Protestant.
The early writings of Bodin, such as Lettre à Jean Bautru des Matras, reveal that he was not a
staunch Protestant but rather an opponent of the Roman Catholic Church, its hierarchy, and
certain of its questionable religious practises. Bodin was a religious man who believed that
religion amounted to "nothing beyond gazing to God with a cleansed spirit." These comments
are more indicative of an adherent to a non-traditional but maybe naturalist worldview than a
reformed Calvinist.

THEORIES OF JEAN BODIN

A.SOVEREIGNTY:

A notion from the field of political philosophy that describes the very pinnacle of a state's
government and its ability to execute the law. The move from feudalism to nationalism may
be traced back to 16th-century France, when political thinker Jean Bodin utilised the notion
of sovereignty to strengthen the king's control over his feudal lords. The notion of popular
sovereignty, or the sovereignty of the people via an organised government, emerged around
the late 18th century as a result of the social compact. Sovereign nations' freedom of action in
international affairs has been constrained by the United Nations, the Geneva Conventions,
and other international agreements.

The term's original meaning was comparable to supreme authority, and it was derived from
the Latin word superanus through the French word souveraineté. This original intent is
frequently lost in translation when it is put into reality.
SOVEREIGNTY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS:

The theory of sovereignty has mostly impacted international affairs, but it has also had
significant effects on domestic dynamics inside nations. Problems arise because Bodin argued
that sovereigns who create the laws cannot be bound by the laws they enact. There is a
common understanding that a sovereign owes no allegiance to anybody or is subject to any
laws. However, this view is not supported by a deeper study of Bodin's texts. To this end, he
highlighted that even with regard to their own inhabitants, sovereigns are required to uphold
some fundamental laws drawn from the law of God, the law of nature or reason, and the law
that is common to all countries (jus gentium).

The Sovereign is also bound by the Constitution or other basic laws of the State that define
Sovereignty, Succession to Sovereignty, and the Boundaries of Sovereignty. Bodin's
sovereign was therefore constrained by both the state's constitution and the higher law that
was universally held to be obligatory. Many of the norms that would eventually be
incorporated into international law were first addressed by Bodin, and he considered them to
be obligatory upon governments. However, his ideas have been used to legitimise both
domestic absolute rule and international anarchy.

DIVIDED SOVEREIGNTY:

The embrace of the idea of total, unrestricted sovereignty did not persist long, either in the
internal or international arena. As democracies spread, they restrained the authority of heads
of state and elites in significant ways. As globalisation has progressed, the'might is right'
doctrine has been hampered by the increased interdependence of governments. There can be
no peace without law, and there can be no law without certain limits on sovereignty, as
citizens and politicians have usually realised.

Since then, many international organisations like NATO, the WTO, and the European Union
have emerged as means for these states to pool their sovereignty to the degree necessary to
ensure continued peace and economic growth (EU). Regional and international organisations,
in addition to national governments, increasingly asserted sovereignty on behalf of the
world's people. As a result, the concept of shared sovereignty, which had hitherto only been
used inside federal states, was shown to be relevant in the global arena.
B. ECONOMIC THOUGHTS

In his Response to the Paradoxes of Malestroit (1568) and its revised second edition (1578),
Bodin lays forth his primary economic principles. In the Response, we examine the causes of
the severe and persistent inflation that plagued Europe during the sixteenth century. One of
the first descriptions of the Quantity Theory of Money is attributed to Bodin in this book. An
extremely simplified version of the Quantity Theory of Money simply asserts that the
quantity of money in circulation has an immediate and decisive effect on market prices. This
comprehensive evaluation of the state's potential resources may be found in Book 6, Chapter
2 of the République. Bodin integrated certain sections of the Response into his République
and then reworked those sections for the updated version of the Response, therefore there is
some duplication between the two works.

QUANTITATIVE THEORY OF MONEY

In the sixteenth century, Europe had widespread high inflation. It all started in Spain, but
quickly expanded to the countries around it. This was mostly because of the greater amount
of silver and gold that were sent from the Spanish possessions in the New World to Europe.
Malestroit argued that the consistent price of precious metals over the last 300 years is due to
changes in the unit of account brought about by debasement, rather than to any fundamental
shift in the value of the metals themselves.

On two fronts, Bodin disputed Malestroit's assessment. First, he demonstrated that Malestroit
had used flawed evidence; among Malestroit's supporting arguments was the assertion that
the price of velvet had been constant since the fourteenth century, which he had shown to be
false. However, Bodin raised doubts over whether or not velvet was really known in pre-
Revolutionary France. Second, Bodin was able to show that debasement wasn't the only
source of the massive inflation that had occurred. While it was certainly a contributing
component, it wasn't the main one.

C. RELIGIOUS THOUGHTS

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Christianity was rocked by violent power battles among its
own ranks. It was in France that the bloodiest fighting between Catholics and Huguenots took
place. Furthermore, a world of very different religious views had lately been revealed outside
the confines of Christendom, raising the dilemma of how to identify the "true religion" (vera
religio), or the one that God intended for mankind to follow. The works Démonomanie,
Colloquium heptaplomeres, and Universae naturae theatrum by Bodin are his most significant
religious contributions. Religion and national security are also topics of discussion in the
République.

Bodin was an unorthodox believer in the perspective of many, but it's hard to see him as an
atheist given his view of real religion as something very personal for which no institution was
necessary. According to him, atheism posed a serious threat to society at large. For Bodin, the
stability of the state is at stake when it comes to battling atheism; he argues that atheists
should not be allowed to live in the commonwealth because they have no moral or ethical
qualms about disobeying the rules of the state. Bodin, however, had further grounds for his
anti-atheism: those who reject God's existence are blasphemers.

RELEVANCE
The concept of legislative sovereignty was brought to England in part via Bodin's
République. One expert notes that his exact understanding of sovereignty was primarily
responsible for his outsized impact on the political ideas of Elizabethan and Jacobean
England. Sir Robert Filmer (c. 1588–1653), one of the political authors who supported the
king's rights, relied extensively on Bodin's works.

However, these events were regarded with some perplexity until decades after Bodin. No
matter how effective a divergence from this standard may have been in practise, no pluralist
theory of sovereignty could ever dispel the notion that sovereignty was in its core an absolute
and undivided power. The factional strife that was tearing France down could have served as
the impetus for some of Bodin's mistakes, as he sought an appealing theory that secured order
and fostered effective governance. There are other anomalies that reveal more about Bodin's
intellectual development. The greatest of mediaeval and Renaissance learning had not
prevented him from organising his social life according to the categories of pre-modern
France, a world of organisations, guilds, estates, and chartered towns. Bodin is on the cusp of
the early modern era; the dividing line is not crossed until Hobbes comes along.

One of Bodin's most influential contributions was the Theory of Climate, which is now more
often identified with another French philosopher, Montesquieu. Bodin's departure from
mediaeval practises was marked by his use of a comparative and empirical approach to
historical research, law, and religion. His Colloquium heptaplomeres is among the oldest
works of comparative religion, and he was one of the most prominent legal philosophers of
his day.
CONCLUSION
Bodin was not a perfectly consistent thinker, and even his contemporaries and early
detractors recognised that some of his most well-known theses regarding sovereignty rested
on misunderstandings about the nature and use of political authority. His most famous thesis,
that sovereignty was indivisible and absolute in theory, has been rendered obsolete by the
historical successes of constitutional division of powers and the intrinsically pluralist
structure of federalist governments.