Putting Nature and Nations Asunder 145Aristotle, he saw the state as an in de pen dent and self- subsisting entity. More
importantly, though, he pioneered the idea that rulers were not governed by
the same code of conduct as ordinary persons. For individuals, rules of the
Christian religion may be said to be binding. But states, as public entities—
along with the princes who ruled them— lived by a diff erent set of norms
that were peculiar to them.
Th e other major fi gure of the sixteenth century presented a sharp con-
trast to Machiavelli. Th is was the French lawyer Jean Bodin, who wrote in
the second half of the century. Comparatively little is known of his life. He
was born in Angers, the son of a tailor. Aft er studying at the Universities of
Paris and Toulouse, he practiced law in Paris for a time. He was fi ercely
critical of Machiavelli’s thought and also religiously devout, although in
precisely what manner is diffi cult to say. It is possible that he had some Jew-
ish ancestry, and there was some belief that he converted to Judaism during
his life. But he was imprisoned for a time for expressing Protestant views
and was denounced by some as an atheist. He only narrowly missed being
killed in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572. Perhaps not surpris-
ingly, he was an advocate of religious toleration, although in the tense atmo-
sphere of the period, he kept this opinion largely to himself. Strongly infl u-
enced by humanist learning, he maintained that law was better understood
as the product of history than as a set of eternal and unvarying norms. But
his modernism had its limits. In a noteworthy treatise on witchcraft in 1580,
he advocated the burning to death of those found guilty of that heinous
off ense.
Bodin’s major work, Six Books on the Commonwealth, was published in
- If Machiavelli’s writings were, if anything, too clear and outspoken for
their author’s own good, Bodin’s were of the opposite extreme— so disor ga-
nized and dense that it is oft en diffi cult to discern what he was really trying
to convey. He is universally hailed as the leading writer on— if not actually
the intellectual inventor of— state sovereignty. But it is no easy matter fi gur-
ing out just what he said on that momentous subject that was so innovative
or striking. In general, Bodin was a champion of the centralization of the
French state against the various forces of localism. On ths point, he was a
radical and doctrinaire fi gure. He insisted that sovereignty— meaning, basi-
cally, the rights of the crown— is unitary and indivisible. Th ere can be no
sharing of sovereign rights with lesser members of the community.