himself studied and taught in Toulouse before moving to Paris in 1559,
published in his Six Livres de la Républiquean analysis of the relation-
ship of sovereign to subjects within an ideal commonwealth which
earned him the reputation of founding the science of the state.^45
Jean Bodin was a member of a school of French lawyer-humanists
whose ambition was to make from Roman law a public law that was
valid for their own age, while preserving the distinctive customs of
what they believed to be France’s ancient ‘feudal’ constitution. He
stands at the beginning of ‘the modern state’ because the venture led
him to compare the evolution of the laws and constitutions of all
the historical commonwealths he could find, thus turning the abstract
status reipublicaeinto the living étatwhich could be recognized and
anatomized. Ten years before his Républiquehe produced (in Latin) a
work of great originality on the study of history, by which, he main-
tained, the explanation of the state and transformations of common-
wealths (in Rerum publicarum statu et conversionibus) must be sought.
No one from Aristotle onwards, he maintained, had yet been able to
define ‘the best state of the civitas’; Machiavelli had advanced the
subject with his maxims, but he would have written more truly if he had
joined his experience to the science of philosophers and historians.
Bodin’s strategy in his Method for the better understanding of historyis
to search for the optimus reipublicae statusamong actual common-
wealths, analysing the states and vicissitudes of Jewish rule (status et
conversiones imperii Hebraeorum) in the pages of the first-century
Josephus; the ‘state of the Romans’ in the writings of Livy, Cicero, and
Polybius; the alterations of power in Britain from the English Historyof
Polydore Vergil, who had died when Bodin was in his teens; and the
types of government amongst the Swiss and in Venice, Florence, Genoa,
Lucca, and Nuremberg (as well as Germany as a whole) with the help
of a great range of historians. States of commonwealths, Bodin insists,
is what history is about, not the traditional succession of four empires
and ages of gold.^46
In the MethodusBodin is intent on analysing the supreme power in a
polity, ‘which the Italians call signory, we sovereignty, the Latins
summam rerumand summum imperium’, for a commonwealth is not
made by the confederation and commercial relations of cities, or even
Jean Bodin on the state 317(^45) I have used Les Six Livres de la République de I. Bodin Angevinin the edition printed in
Paris in 1580.
(^46) Methodus ad Facilem Historiarum Cognitionem, in Oeuvres philosophiques de Jean
Bodin, ed. and tr. P. Mesnard (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951), 107–9, 114, and
the key ch. 6, De statu rerumpublicarum, 167–223; the introductory chapter of J. G. A.
Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, 2nd edn. (Cambridge UP, 1987), gives
an account of the influence of the French jurists’ historical studies on the development of con-
stitutional ideas.