Jean Bodin

Jean Bodin (Angers, 1530 - Laon, 1596) was a French jurist and political philosopher, a member of the Parlement of Paris and a law professor at the University of Toulouse. He lived in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation and wrote amid the religious conflicts that divided France. He is remembered above all for his theory of sovereignty, a cornerstone of modern political thought, and he is also regarded as a forerunner of the systematic study of history and of the quantity theory of money.

He was probably born into a comfortably off family of artisans and received a good education, apparently at the Carmelite house in Angers, where he became a novice. In 1549 he was released from his monastic vows and moved to Paris, studying at the university and at the humanist-leaning Collège des Quatre Langues. Later he studied and taught Roman law at Toulouse under Arnaud du Ferrier. He returned to Paris in 1561 as a licensed attorney before the Parlement, and from the mid-1560s onward he published works on historiography and economics.

His Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1566) organised the study of history into three realms, human, natural and divine, and argued that political knowledge helps readers make sense of historical texts. In 1568 he answered Malestroit, attributing rising prices chiefly to the growing supply of gold and silver. His best-known work, The Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576), defines sovereignty as absolute, perpetual and indivisible power, and sorts forms of government by where that sovereignty lies: with the people, with a minority, or with a single ruler.

His public career was uneven. From 1577 until the death of Prince François of Anjou in 1584 he served as one of the prince's advisers, accompanying him to England and on the failed raid on Antwerp. After these setbacks he withdrew to Laon, where he worked as a procurator and supported the Catholic League between 1589 and 1593. He died there of plague in 1596.

His writings on demonology, especially On the Demon-Mania of Witches (1580), laid out methods for pursuing witches and sorcerers, and some of his fellow magistrates criticised them. His dialogue Colloquium Heptaplomeres, in which seven wise men of different faiths live together in harmony, remained unpublished until 1858. His ideas on sovereignty reached Hobbes and Locke, and his analysis of money and prices became a landmark in the history of economic thought.