146 Reason and Its Rivals (ca. 1550– 1815)Where Bodin’s ideas broke new ground was in seeing sovereignty not pri-
marily as a property or attribute of a prince, but instead in terms of a corpus
of rights with an in de pen dent existence, clearly distinct from the person who
might have eff ective custody of those rights at a given time. Bodin, in short,
advanced the pro cess of conceptually separating states as such from govern-
ments— a seminal step in international law, which would become, in its later
stages, primarily a law between states as such and only secondarily a law of
governments.
Another feature of Bodin’s thought that prefi gured later trends was his insis-
tence on a sharp distinction between right and law. Right, he explained, con-
cerns “what is equitable,” whereas law concerns “what is commanded.” Th e two
had no necessary connection with one another. “Law,” as he forthrightly put it,
“is nothing else than the command of the sovereign in the exercise of his sov-
ereign power.” In this regard, Bodin fi gures as a precursor of nineteenth-
century positivism.
It must not be supposed, however, that Bodin rejected the medieval idea
of universalism altogether, or that he was a dogmatic proponent of absolute
and unlimited royal power. Th at was far from the case, for he carefully in-
sisted on three important limits on royal power. One was that monarchs
must be subject to divine law (i.e., to the commands of God, as expressed in
the holy scriptures). Second, monarchs remained subject to natural law,
which he envisaged not so much in rational terms as in an intuitive way. Th e
principles of natural law shine forth by their own intrinsic clarity and im-
print themselves in the minds of people— including rulers. Th is subjection
to natural law meant, among other things, that monarchs were bound to
observe any treaties which they concluded, since the due per for mance of
contracts was a principle of natural law. Th e third limitation was that sover-
eigns remained subject to any constitutional constraints that might exist
within their realms.
Only secondarily was Bodin concerned with international relations. He
did not, like Dante, envisage a single world sovereign. He was, however, a
strong believer in the idea of a worldwide human community of peoples— to
the point of regarding the various nations as constituent parts of a “univer-
sal republic of this world.” Natural law was, of course, applicable to the
members of this “universal republic,” but Bodin appreciated that natural
law, on its own, was not suffi cient to regulate the relations between in de pen-