Jean bodin: The modern state comes into being

Abstract

There can be no doubt that in the history of political thought, the French humanist and jurist Jean Bodin (1529–1596) is linked primarily to two fundamental concepts: sovereignty and absolutism. They constitute the core in his extremely comprehensive study of the modern state, to which I shall refer in this chapter as State (Bodin 1583, 1992). 1 The central topic of this chapter will be the presentation of the two concepts, but without an overview of the challenges that the French monarchy faced in the Renaissance, or (as it is more usually called today) the Early Modern period, in the second half of the sixteenth century, it is hard to grasp either the problems with which Bodin was confronted or his suggestions about how his contemporaries should tackle them.