Commonwealth

particular suitability [VI, vi].
This treatment of the theme of justice, therefore, does not really bring the 
argument back to the state considered as the instrument of the good life. It 
is true that justice here means right order in the commonwealth, but it is 
the right order that preserves it as a type, rather than any embodiment of 
universal moral principles. As he said, states must live before they can 

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live well, and the discussion in book IV of the causes of revolution made it 
clear that they do not find it so easy to live. The whole work ends on this 
note, how may their survival be assured.
However, the theme of book I, that the state exists to promote virtue in its 
citizens, is not completely lost sight of, and at one point in the final 
book he returns to the problem of the pursuit of higher ends. Every state, 
he says, ought to undertake the moral discipline of its citizens, such as 
was exercised in pagan Rome by the censors. In the modem state he regarded 
it as the function of priests and ministers of religion, [VI, i]. The Church 
has a duty and a place within the state. It is clear that when he included 
true religion in that total good which it is the state's purpose to promote, 
he did not only mean that the prince should free the practice of one's 
beliefs from legal restrictions. He also meant that the clergy have a 
necessary function in the disciplining of the citizen. They are not however 
solely responsible for this discipline. It is a duty incumbent on the 
sovereign to use such opportunities as he has to the same end. Surprisingly 
enough he thought the proper management of taxation a suitable means. In 
spite of the chronic inadequacy of the revenues in France in his day, he 
clung to the conviction that the king ought to be able to 'live of his own', 
and that taxes were an extraordinary expedient which ought never to be 
allowed to establish themselves as an ordinary source of revenue. 
Nevertheless, he had to recognize that there are crises for which the 
ordinary revenues do not suffice. On such occasions, when taxes must be 
imposed, they should be on luxury articles, not because that involves taxing 
the rich and the rich should pay, or because it is economically sound, but 
because the most effective way of checking self-indulgence and vicious 
habits is to make them expensive [VI, ii].
As has been shown, the Six books of the Commonwealth was an immediate 
success, and a much read book for about fifty years after its appearance. 
Nevertheless from Bodin's point of view it was perhaps only a partial 
success. Although his doctrine of the relativity of political institutions 
has attracted much attention in present times, Bodin wholly failed to 
impress his contemporaries as a student of politics. Rulers did not carry 
round a copy of his book as they were reported to do with the Prince. Apart 
from its immense length, it was not very digestible. The form is repellent 
to all except the determined reader. Bodin buried his conclusions under a 
mass of evidence and long scholarly discussions of its interpretation. The 
presentation was formal and elaborate in an old-fashioned way. The chapters 
were very long, unparagraphed, and with few marginal headings to indicate 
the succession of subjects of discussion. Emphatically, not the sort of 
reading that men of affairs take up. He was read by people whose interest in 
politics was speculative rather than practical. What attracted them was his 
doctrine of sovereignty, his analysis of forms, and his defence of monarchy. 

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Everyone writing after Bodin, by direct or indirect influence, repeats what 
he has to say in whole or in part on these subjects. Hobbes, the royalist 
writers, and Locke all assume that the essence of sovereignty is the 
authority to make law, and attribute to the sovereign the powers which he 
does. Hobbes takes over his analysis of essential forms, the royalists his 
defence of monarchy on grounds of expediency, and Filmer repeats the whole 
comparative discussion of the characteristics of each form. Even Harrington, 
who belonged to the school of thought that Bodin rejected, and ascribed 
final authority to the people, analysed government into the senate 
proposing, the magistrate executing, and the people resolving. This part of 
his book was indeed almost too convincing. Once his doctrine of sovereignty 
was accepted as common form, his book was no longer kept alive by being a 
subject of controversy. On the other hand the later part suffered from the 
opposite disadvantage, neglect. His scholarly readers were not so interested 
in the discussion of means as of ends. Moreover the fact that he based his 
doctrine of environment on a cosmological system which was on the point of 
being abandoned at the very time he was writing probably contributed to the 
oblivion which was the fate of this part of his work. Montesquieu could 
claim that the Esprit des Lois was a work which had no parentage.
It was a long time before anyone else attempted to survey so immense a field 
of political experience, and to carry any further his enquiry into the 
meaning of the variety of political forms and institutions in all places and 
at all times. No one, not even Montesquieu, emulated the grandeur of his 
design. One had to be as near the middle ages in time, and in spirit, as 
Bodin was, to think and write of the state in relation to the cosmic 
process, at once rooted in it and reflecting it. He concluded his defence of 
monarchy with the same argument as Dante and his kind had used. The 
microcosm should reflect the macrocosm, and thus. since the universe is 
subject to the sole and sovereign majesty of God, so the commonwealth should 
be subject to the sole and sovereign majesty of the prince [VI, iv].
The Six books of the Commonwealth marks the transition from specifically 
medieval to specifically modem ways of political thinking. It at once 
recorded that process and assisted its accomplishment. His scholarship 
combined the methods of the old learning with the interests of the new. He 
asked new questions because he perceived new problems. He recognized the 
emergence of the state as the all-important and all-powerful instrument of 
men's fate. But he could not, as could Machiavelli, rid himself of the 
belief in a universal order of absolute values, in which the state still had 
a place. His book is all the more interesting because the transition is not 
perfectly accomplished. This comes out in his inability to make a clear 
separate of right and fact. He could neither say consistently with the 
schoolmen, let us consider things as they ought to be if the purposes of God 
are to be accomplished, or with Machiavelli, let us consider things as they 

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must be if men are to have what they desire. Because he was an acute and 
original observer he was able to analyse the state, its marks, its types, 
its functions, with clarity. But it is not finally clear whether he still 
thought its purpose was to make men good by acting as the instrument of a 
higher law, or had begun to think it existed in its own right to afford them 
security.