Commonwealth

particulars within it, in a single system of relationships. To that order 
all actions and all institutions must be referred as their end. It is 
spontaneously realized in all created things save man. The proper motions of 
the heavenly bodies can be determined by observation because in them there 
is no imperfection. But when one comes to consider men, the divine and 
natural intention has been disturbed by the Fall. The proper order of human 
society cannot therefore be determined by observation simply, because men 
are imperfect. To know that order we must consult natural reason, and with 
even more certainty, the law of God revealed in the scriptures. For Bodin 
therefore, as he himself observed at the beginning, the science of politics 
must be founded in a philosophy of the state indicating ends.
Moreover a moral imperative is implied since men, knowing by revelation and 
the light of natural reason what the divine intention is, are bound in 

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conscience to endeavour to realize it.
In fact Bodin's political thought was rooted in a body of dogma, the law of 
God. It should perhaps be observed in passing that he appears to mean the 
Old Testament Scriptures alone. There is no single citation from the New 
Testament throughout the work, and a reference to the trial of Christ is 
only there to illustrate the powers of Roman provincial governors. Bodin had 
read Calvin, and forcibly approved his condemnation of rebellion, yet he 
never mentions Romans xiii on which it was based [II, v].
From these premises it is not surprising to find that Bodin was at one with 
Calvin and the earlier reformers in seeing the state as originating in the 
Fall. The disorder and violence of the times he lived in converted what had 
been a traditional doctrine into a living belief. The state is necessary 
because men are wicked. But whereas Calvin adhered to the old view that the 
sin was the sin of rebellion against "the commands of God, for Bodin it was 
the sin of injustice against one's fellow men. He reverts several times to 
the theme that the state originated in violence [I, vi and IV, i]. Sometimes 
he represents it as the consequence of a passion for dominion, of which 
Nimrod was the first exemplar. At others he ascribes it to an instinct of 
mutual association as a means of protection against such acts of violence 
[III, vii]. But in either case, it is the same evils which threaten men, the 
destruction of their liberty and the seizure of their possessions.
This shift of emphasis to be observed when one passes from Calvin to Bodin 
is significant of a newly developing doctrine of rights inherent in the 
individual, and prior to the state. In the second half of the sixteenth 
century the old conception of the primitive state of innocence was 
undergoing important modification. The liberty that men enjoyed in that 
primitive natural society was assumed not to have been lost -- as Calvin 
thought it had been lost -- but to be inalienable, and its preservation the 
foundation of all legitimate political authority. Such views were being 
expressed by François Hotman in his Franco-Gallia of 1573, and a short while 
after the publication of the Six books of the Commonwealth in the Vindiciae 
contra tyrannos of 1579. Bodin never used such phrases as 'natural rights', 
or 'inherent rights'. But he assumed all through two rights in the 
individual sanctioned by divine and natural law, liberty and property. 
For once his treatment of the subject of liberty was fragmentary, perhaps 
because his preoccupation with order led him to approach the state 
throughout from the point of view of the authority of the ruler, rather than 
that of the rights of the subject. But his main conception is clear. He 
defined natural liberty as perfect freedom to live as one pleases, subject 
only to the rule of reason [I, iii]. This is qualified when a man becomes a 
citizen by the obligation to obey the ruler. But he did not, as did Hotman 

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and the author of the Vindiciae contra tyrannos, hold that such an 
obligation is compatible with freedom only when the citizen consents to law 
and government. He would not allow that consent plays any part whatsoever in 
the obligation to obey. Since, as will appear later, the prince and the law 
through which he speaks are subject to divine and natural law, for Bodin the 
ultimate sanction of the individual's liberty, and the guarantee that the 
necessary restrictions on it in a political society shall be reasonable, is 
not consent, but the imprescriptibility of divine and natural law.
His treatment of the subject of property is incidental to his defence of the 
family, and his desire to preserve its integrity. This he saw could only be 
done by preserving the integrity of its property, threatened by rights of 
alienation and the depredations of the tax-collector. He therefore, long 
before either Grotius or Locke, defended private property as sanctioned by 
divine and natural law, and deduced that the ruler has no right to tax at 
will [I, viii]. He never asked however, as Grotius and Locke asked, how 
these rights were distinguished and delimited in the first instance. He 
simply assumed that the existing state of affairs was sanctioned by the 
tenth commandment. As a civilian, writing of a society in which property 
usually meant inherited real estate, he may have assumed as obvious that the 
rights of individual families went back to an original occupation of res 
nullius. But however they arose, these rights he regarded as so sacred that 
the property of the subject cannot be taken from him without his consent, 
save by legal escheat or confiscation. Presumably he meant that the consent 
of the Estates was necessary to the imposition of any new tax.
The establishment of the principle that there are certain imprescriptible 
rights in the individual provided him with the means of distinguishing the 
rightly ordered state from that which is not so. Tyrannical government is 
one under which the liberty and property of the subject are arbitrarily 
invaded, a legitimate government one where the ruler or rulers respect and 
guarantee them [II, ii]. If then he agreed with Calvin that the state 
originated in sin, he did not agree with him that in consequence it is 
merely a machinery for the punishment of sin. He followed up his account of 
the wickedness of the first rulers by observing that in the face of the 
threat of enslavement, men were drawn together to form a society whose 
purpose was the preservation of rights [III, vii]. A true state is therefore 
a droit gouvernement.
It is clear from his discussion of the term droit that he meant nothing less 
by it than the whole good of man. He repeats the accepted formula that the 
body should be disciplined to virtuous activity, and virtuous activity 
directed to the apprehension of eternal truth. Aquinas would have agreed. 
But Bodin added that contemplation, or the development of those qualities of 
mind whereby men distinguish good and evil, true and false, pious and 

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impious, is not only the sovereign good of the individual, but also the true 
end of the state, for he explicitly identified the two. The importance of 
this modification can hardly be exaggerated, for it brings not only natural 
virtue, but religion within the sphere of politics [I, i]. He does not 
however enlarge upon the implications, nor ever discuss the Church as such. 
But it is clear that he did not mean that the state has an obligation to 
establish 'true religion', or that it is for the prince to set up an 
organized Church and compel conformity to it. This is clear from his 
treatment of the subject of heresy [IV, vii]. He objected to persecution as 
only too likely to produce a general scepticism about religion. This he 
thought a disaster of the first importance, for in his opinion any system of 
beliefs is to be preferred to none. Religion, because it induces reverence 
and obedience, is the foundation of the commonwealth, and it largely rests 
with the prince whether it flourishes or not. What the prince must do is to 
establish conditions under which religion in the general sense is 
encouraged. Only by toleration of all forms can genuine piety be promoted, 
and only the prince can implement a policy of toleration. When therefore 
Bodin makes droit the end of the state, he does not mean, as Aristotle did, 
that the state is the means to the good life because political activity is 
the highest exercise of virtue. He meant that the state alone can maintain 
those conditions under which subjects can individually live virtuous, 
thoughtful, and pious lives. The best state, he says, is the one in which 
the greatest number of citizens live such lives.
Bodin was at the same time fully aware of the fact that in this imperfect 
world all states fall short of this ideal in varying degrees, and pursue 
not the highest good, but some particular good only, Sparta courage and 
devotion, Rome justice. As he says, the state must first secure the lives of 
its citizens before it can consider how they should live virtuously, and the 
energies of most states are absorbed in the initial effort of survival. In 
fact, in the ensuing books of the Six books of the Commonwealth the 
discussion is largely confined to this immediate problem of 
self-preservation. But as he said in his opening chapter, he did not intend 
to take Plato as his model and describe an ideal impossible of realization. 
Like Aristotle, he was looking for the best in the possible, and he was 
fully aware that as things were, states fell far below the level of what in 
favourable circumstances they might become. Having defined the ideal, or 
ultimate goal, his practical intention involved concentrating on what can in 
fact be achieved.
When he comes to consider the essential structure of the state, he follows 
Aristotle in holding that the family group, and not the individual, is the 
unit out of which the commonwealth is made up [I, ii]. He agreed that the 
family is a natural society held together by the authority of the husband 
over the wife, the father over his children and the master over his 

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servants, all sharing a common means of subsistence. But what he emphasized 
was its moral and political rather than its economic significance, 
complaining that Aristotle neglected this aspect of it. He discussed it from 
the point of view of the father, and the father in his role of ruler rather 
than in his role of organizer of the common life. This was because, as is 
clear from all that he has to say about both the origin of the state, and 
the causes of its destruction, he was convinced that what men chiefly need 
is discipline to correct their factious and rebellious spirits. Therefore, 
he wanted to see the authority of the father not only preserved, but 
strengthened even to the extent of the power of life and death over his 
dependants, for he saw in that power the only means of training the young in 
the habit of obedience necessary to be acquired if they were later to 
exhibit that submission to the ruler proper in a subject [I, iv]. Good 
citizens are made in the nursery. It is thus its political importance that 
impels him to defend the authority of parents.
Starting from these ideas of sin and its correction, it is not surprising 
that he should have seen the state in terms of power [I, viii]. Its 
distinguishing mark is puissance souveraine, a sovereign power. It is 
necessarily perpetual and absolute, for any person or persons, within the 
community or outside it, who can impose any time limits, or restrictions on 
its competence, must be the true sovereign, and the apparent sovereign only 
an agent. His admission of lois royales, or fundamental laws of the French 
monarchy, does not really compromise these statements. The salic law is a 
rule restricting, not the exercise of sovereignty, but the choice of the 
person who may exercise it. The denial of the right to alienate royal domain 
was an application of the principle of Roman law that the one thing a 
sovereign cannot do is to destroy his own sovereignty, and this, Bodin 
thought, the impoverishment of the Crown would bring about.
On the other hand the use of the term 'absolute' did not necessarily imply 
that sovereign power was underived, since jurists were familiar with the 
Roman theory that the imperium is inherent in the community, and conferred 
by it on the ruler. But Bodin, though trained in the civil law, rejected 
this part of it. He did so almost certainly because the doctrine of the 
popular origin of political authority was already being associated by 
Huguenot writers such as Hotman, with doctrines of the right of resistance. 
It was very likely this association which led Bodin to deny that consent to 
government was any part of natural liberty, or that the obligation to obey 
depended on such consent being given. Bodin's ideas on the origin of 
political authority derive not from the civil law but from the Hebrew 
Scriptures. All power is of God [I, viii]. All right to command is therefore 
essentially independent of the consent of the commanded. The artificial 
society of the commonwealth should be modelled on the natural society of the 
family, and no father is appointed by his children to rule over them.

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The unqualified right to command is therefore the distinguishing mark of the 
ruler. This characterization of the sovereign in terms of power is one of 
Bodin's most original conceptions, and marks the break with the traditional 
view of the king, enshrined in coronation oaths in use everywhere, that he 
was in virtue of his office essentially the embodiment of justice, and his 
primary function was to judge his subjects. Such a conception of monarchy 
was still that commonly held. Louis XII, busy with projects for the 
codification of law, spoke of himself as 'débiteur de justice à nos sujets'. 
The same view was taken by so eminent a contemporary of Bodin's as the 
Chancellor, Michel de L'Hôpital, whose politique views on the French 
monarchy, expounded in his great speech to the Estates in 1560, were in 
other ways very much the same as Bodin's. Kings were first instituted, he 
told them, for the sake of justice, and this remains the essential attribute 
of the kingly office, as is shown by the representation of the king on the 
great seal, seated on his throne in the act of judgement.[3] Bodin, while 
agreeing that all jurisdiction derived from the king, did not even include 
the exercise of jurisdiction among the attributes of sovereignty, much less 
make it the distinctive mark, since the king exercises this right 
indirectly, by delegation [IV, vi]. For him the peculiar and essential mark 
of sovereignty is the right to make law; it is its unique attribute, for it 
is the normal means by which the sovereign indicates his commands. Law then 
is simply the command of the sovereign. This voluntarist conception is 
underlined by the distinction he makes between law -- that which is 
commanded -- and right -- that which is equitable. Only the first proceeds 
from the sovereign.
If law is command simply it includes, as Bodin saw, all activities of the 
sovereign. There are however certain matters which the sovereign must attend 
to himself in virtue of his office and not delegate to the subject, as he 
delegates rights of jurisdiction, and these powers Bodin calls the 
attributes of sovereignty. First there is included what Locke called the 
federative power, or sole right of making war and peace, and concluding 
alliances. Second there is the right to authorize all appointments to public 
office, whatever the actual procedure in use. Again, as the source of all 
rights of jurisdiction, the sovereign is the final resort of appeal for all 
his subjects and in all causes. Finally he has the exclusive right to demand 
unqualified oaths of submission, for the relations of the subject to his 
sovereign are unique in that all his other obligations, as vassal of his 
lord, for instance, are subject to the prior obligation to his sovereign. 
These rights are inseparable from sovereignty, for the alienation or 
delegation of any one of them destroys the sovereign.
From these premises Bodin was able to reach that conclusion that he was 
convinced must be established if any order was to be maintained anywhere. 
There is no right whatsoever in the subject of rebellion against the 

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sovereign he had no part in instituting or of disobedience to the law he had 
no part in making [II, v]. So long as the king had been regarded as the 
embodiment of justice, the obligation to obey was conditional on the justice 
of the command. But once the king was conceived of as an absolute and 
independent power, the usual grounds of resistance were denied. At the same 
time Bodin wanted to establish a positive obligation to unconditional 
obedience. He did so by postulating that political authority was of divine 
institution. Natural and divine law oblige a man to obey the ruler set over 
him by God. Much as he might condemn tyranny, he would not allow that the 
cruellest of tyrants and the most unjust of laws may be resisted. The virtue 
of the citizen is the virtue of obedience.
So much does Bodin insist on power as the distinguishing mark of the state 
that he comes very near to saying that it is the existence of a sovereign 
that constitutes a state. He defines the state in terms of its government, 
'a rightly ordered government', and citizenship in terms of subjection, for 
it is not any rights which he may enjoy that make a man a citizen, but his 
subjection to a sovereign power [I, vi]. The identity of a state therefore 
depends on the identity of its sovereign [IV, i]. Every revolution, whether 
sudden or gradual, which results in the seat of sovereignty being changed 
involves the foundation of a new state, though laws and institutions remain 
without alteration. This happened when the slow growth of the power of the 
Princes converted Germany from a monarchy to an aristocracy. But no 
revolution in laws and institutions, such as the setting up of Lutheran 
churches in the Scandinavian states, creates a new commonwealth, if 
sovereignty remains in the same place. Bodin could not go quite so far as 
Hobbes and define the commonwealth as a number of individuals united solely 
by their individual subjection to a common power, for he thought of men as 
naturally sociable, and any association of men as based on mutual amity even 
more than on justice [III, vii]. But sharing Hobbes's acute fear of anarchy, 
he was possessed by the same conviction that the recognition of an absolute 
sovereign power was the only bulwark against it. Where there is no such 
power, there can be no political society. 
This insistence that effective power was the mark of the state does not mean 
however that Bodin was the exponent of power politics in the same sense that 
Machiavelli was. Nor could he have said with Hobbes that there is no 
distinction of right and wrong, just and unjust, until a sovereign makes 
laws creating such distinctions. As has already been shown, he included the 
idea of right, as well as of power, in his definition of the state. Though 
he distinguished law and equity, it was because of the difference in 
provenance. The one proceeds from the sovereign and the other from God. But 
in a rightly ordered society there should be no opposition between them; law 
should conform to equity. Starting as he did from the conception of an 
absolute moral order, he was necessarily emphatic that if the sovereign is 

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absolute in relation to the subject, he is not so in relation to God. To 
God, as the author of his authority, he is in all things answerable. The 
sovereign is not therefore a law unto himself, but the instrument of divine 
law, bound to make his laws conform to its principles [I, viii]. From the 
point of view of the oppressed subject, this qualification of the absolute 
authority of the ruler would seem to be of no practical importance, since no 
human agent might appoint himself the executor of divine justice. But it was 
a qualification very generally accepted as of the first importance in the 
sixteenth century. In the next century it was writers such as Bossuet, or 
James I and Filmer, rather than Hobbes, who were Bodin's spiritual heirs in 
this respect.
Bodin however did not intend that the moral sanctions governing the exercise 
of sovereign power should be unreal. His insistence that the prince must act 
as the instrument of divine and natural law led him to make considerable 
qualifications of practical import in the absolutism of a monarch who 
governs as he should. It is sometimes said that Bodin's ideal was 
constitutional monarchy, because he advocated the summoning of Estates. It 
is not so much Estates however which he thought of as tempering the improper 
exercise of absolute power, for he thought their function purely 
consultative, but rather the unvarying rule of law based on equity.
This comes out very clearly when in book III he proceeds to analyse the 
essential structure of government, as a counterpart to his analysis of the 
essential structure of the state. The inclusion of the term 'rightly ordered 
government' in his definition of the commonwealth required such an 
investigation. For government to be efficiently, still more for it to be 
justly, conducted, three things are necessary, counsel, execution, and 
assent. The commonwealth should therefore be provided with a 'senate' or 
council with a constitutional right to advise the sovereign, a magistracy 
with legal rights of jurisdiction, and Estates which provide a means of 
communication between subjects and sovereign. A council and Estates are not 
however a necessary part of the government of the commonwealth. It is highly 
expedient, but not necessary, for the sovereign to act upon advice. He can 
act on his own unassisted judgement, and may choose to do so [III, i]. 
Again, the sovereign need not invite representations from his subjects, nor 
consult with them in matters of public interest. But again, it is highly 
expedient for him to do so. Emphatically as he rejected the doctrine that 
law and government derives from the community, he was fully aware of the 
practical value of consent in securing obedience. Estates provide the 
sovereign with the opportunity both of informing himself of grievances, and 
securing approval for proposed remedies. Such consultation is, however, a 
matter of policy and not obligation [I, viii and III, vii].
But the case of the magistrates is different. They are indispensable to the 

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government of the commonwealth, for though the sovereign is the fountain of 
justice, he necessarily delegates the exercise of powers of jurisdiction. 
The law is his command, but it is not physically possible for him to enforce 
it personally throughout his dominions, or hear all the suits of all his 
subjects, without the magistrate as intermediary. It is on the magistrate 
rather than on the sovereign that the regular functioning of the 
commonwealth depends. Neither the will of the sovereign, nor the law, can 
come into operation until the magistrate gives it effect, or as Bodin says, 
brings it to life [III, v]. He implies that the magistrate has therefore a 
share in sovereign power, though a strictly subordinate one, for he is bound 
in obedience to his sovereign, and holds office during pleasure. But because 
of its indispensability to the functioning of a state, the office pertains 
to the commonwealth and not to the sovereign, who only has the right of the 
provision of persons; and when the magistrate is given discretionary powers, 
and is not bound to apply the letter of the law automatically, he does so in 
right of his office, and not simply as the agent of the sovereign. He 
therefore shares the sovereign's responsibility to divine and natural law, 
and is bound by the principles of equity in all his independent actions.
So Bodin sums up his account of the government of the commonwealth, 'a state 
cannot fail to prosper where the sovereign retains those rights proper to 
his majesty, the senate preserves its authority, the magistrates exercise 
their legitimate powers, and justice runs its ordinary course'. For a prince 
to govern in any other manner is for him to risk becoming a tyrant.
Perhaps an even more serious check on the arbitrary exercise of absolute 
power was the obligation of the sovereign to keep his 'covenants' with his 
subjects. Bodin deduces this obligation from the subjection of the prince to 
divine and natural law. By a 'covenant' he means any law which is the 
outcome of an agreement between the sovereign and his subjects. He gives as 
illustration the promises of redress of grievances, given to the Cortes by 
the Spanish kings on various occasions, in return for a grant of taxation. 
All such agreements he thought binding, and he distinguished them from the 
laws which proceed from the sole will of the prince and so can be abrogated 
by him at pleasure [I, viii]. Moreover his insistence that the prince may 
not tax without consent provides occasions tor the making of such covenants, 
as his example of the Spanish kings shows.
It is clear then that in a rightly ordered commonwealth, governed according 
to the principles of divine and natural law, there is necessarily an 
absolute power, but it should not function as an arbitrary one. Much as he 
learned from Machiavelli, he did not share his faith in the unfettered rule 
of men of ability. His ideal was a state in which, as Harrington would have 
said, there is the regiment of laws and not the regiment of men.

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At the same time, though in the rightly ordered commonwealth there is the 
rule of law, divine, natural, and positive, a political society does not 
cease to be a true commonwealth if these conditions are violated. It is 
still a true commonwealth if it is characterized by a sovereign power. This 
becomes clear when Bodin turns from the consideration of the state to 
states, or the various forms in which the state can be embodied. Until the 
Italians started comparing the workings of despotisms and popular 
governments as they knew them in Italy, no one since ancient times had 
thought of analysing the forms that the state can take. It is true that in 
the later middle ages knowledge of the Politics familiarized scholars with 
Aristotle's six pure types. But since the speculations thus provoked had no 
roots in the practical politics of those times, nothing of importance was 
added to what Aristotle had to say. The Italians on the other hand confined 
themselves to the two types they knew, and did not attempt an exhaustive 
analysis of all possible forms. What is remarkable about Bodin's handling of 
the theme is that it is both exhaustive and freshly observed. He took the 
greatest care to find as exact a description as possible of the actual 
situation and therefore, based as it was on individual observation, there 
was nothing merely derivative in his account.
He started by reducing Aristotle's six types to three, monarchy, aristocracy 
and democracy. because, as he saw, if the existence of a sovereign power is 
the mark of a state, this is a matter of fact, and provides no criterion for 
distinguishing good and bad states. All that can be distinguished in fact is 
the location of sovereign power. With his eye on the actualities of the 
situation, he defined aristocracy not as the rule of the few, but the rule 
of a minority group, and democracy not as the rule of the many, but the rule 
of a majority of the whole body. The mixed constitution, so much admired by 
most of Aristotle's readers, especially in the sixteenth century, he 
rejected as impossible of existence. That which is absolute cannot be 
divided. An absolute power must be unique or it is no power at all [II, i].
Right as he might be in this respect, he would seem to have been sacrificing 
one great advantage. Constitutions, especially European constitutions, were 
very various. The supposition of mixed constitutions provided a formula for 
differentiating a great number of permutations and combinations. Bodin 
however solved the problem in another way. In the first place he made a 
distinction in the way sovereign power is exercised. Each type can operate 
tyrannically as a mere exercise of arbitrary power, regardless of the claims 
of justice or the rights of the subject. Or it can operate despotically as 
the rightful exercise of an arbitrary power over subjects conquered in a 
just war. Or it can operate legitimately in accordance with the principles 
of divine and natural law, safeguarding the inherent rights of subjects.
Bodin appears here to be doing what he had just said could not be done, 

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distinguishing states by a standard of value and not simply by a matter of 
fact. It is not only that the terms 'tyrannical' and 'legitimate' imply 
condemnation in the one case and approval in the other. In the one the 
principles of divine and natural law, which are the mark of the rightly 
ordered government, are observed, and in the other they are not. Bodin would 
probably have answered that he is not here classing states according to the