Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 409 - One to Rule Them All - Jean Bodin.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, One to Rule Them All, Jean Bodin. When I was growing up, we had it drummed into us in civics class that the key to the American political system is the separation of powers. The executive, legislative, and judiciary branches have different spheres of competence and can also check the power of the other spheres as when the president nominates Supreme Court justices and Congress gets to approve or reject these nominations. Back in high school, this was presented to us as a perfectly balanced and calibrated scheme. There was no talk of, say, FDR threatening to pack the Supreme Court to get it to stop thwarting his agenda. Nor did we learn that Congress might just refuse to consider Supreme Court nominations from a president with little more justification than, you can't make us so there. This would happen later in my lifetime when Republicans refused to consider a nomination made by Barack Obama, which was a pretty shocking abuse of power, but not an unprecedented one, as a similarly dubious procedure was also used back in the mid 19th century. American history has always shown how difficult it is to maintain a stable separation of powers as each branch constantly works to tip the balance in its favor. Jean Bodin would have said that it is more than difficult in practical terms. It's conceptually impossible. Sovereignty cannot be divided because there must be an answer to the question whose commands are final. As he says in his pioneering work of political theory, the six books of the Commonwealth, the situation in which power is genuinely divided would be one in which disagreements could be decided only by force. Power can be delegated by the sovereign authority, but it remains vested in that authority and is exercised in the sovereign's name. Now, this sovereign doesn't necessarily need to be a single person. It could be the people as a whole, as in a democracy, or the class of the nobility, as in an aristocracy. Bodin acknowledges the possibility of these forms of constitution, but argues that the best form is a monarchy in which the single power of the sovereign is held by a single man. And it should indeed be a man. Bodin approves of the French Salic law that excludes women from the line of succession and thinks that along with a rule of hereditary inheritance of the throne, this will best serve the goal of political civility. Of course, Bodin lived under a monarchy and as a trained lawyer was steeped in the political and legal thought of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, which typically endorsed royalist forms of government. But it's not like he was unaware of other options. He was also a historian who knew that aristocracy and democracy were not just theoretical possibilities, but states that had existed in other places and times. Furthermore, he understood that his own concept of unified absolute sovereignty was a controversial one. At this very time, as we just saw in the previous episode, Calvinist political treatises were pushing the idea that the ruler serves at the pleasure of the citizens who elected him, while less radical thinkers like Cézel had placed constraints on the authority of the king. Unlike all these authors, the Bodin of the six books of the Commonwealth was, in the words of Quentin Skinner, a virtually unyielding defender of absolutism who saw a strong monarchy as the only means for restoring political unity and peace. I referred to the Bodin of that work in particular because in an earlier treatise called Method for the Easy Comprehension of History from 1566, Bodin had himself adopted a less absolutist position. This work, which has been described as a handbook of advice to students on how to read historians with profit, envisioned the best constitution as a monarchy with checks on its power, along the lines proposed by Cézel. It also rooted the ruler's sovereignty in an exchange of oaths, the mechanism emphasized by Huguenot authors like Hautman. There are two complementary ways to explain why Bodin moved towards a more absolutist position in his six books. The first is straightforward. It was published in 1576, just a few years after the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre and thus in the midst of a particularly chaotic time of religious and military conflict in France. Hence Skinner's remark that Bodin was motivated by the goal of restoring unity and peace. The second explanation is rooted ultimately in Bodin's humanism. After being educated in the Carmelite order as a youngster, Bodin was sent to Paris, where he gained facility in both scholastic and humanist intellectual methods. His first work was an addition and translation of a fairly obscure Greek work on hunting, a good choice to show off his mastery of classical languages and a topic that would appeal to readers among the nobility. He then focused on legal and historical studies, which gave him a basis for both his method of history and the six books. Like other humanists of the era, he came to appreciate the wide variation in law and politics across times and cultures. Like Hautman, he rejected the idea that Roman law would still be suitable for the needs of 16th century France. Yet Bodin continued to hold out hope that a man of broad reading and great insight could devise a truly universal theory of politics, one that transcends the particularities of each place and time. The six books is Bodin's attempt to show that he is that man. His approach in this work, and also the method of history, may show the influence of Peter Ramez, whose ideas Bodin would presumably have encountered in Paris. As typical for Ramez, he begins from the general and moves to the specific. In the case of history, one should start with the history of the whole world, then move on to narratives of certain peoples, and finally home in on the deeds of great individuals. Similarly, with politics, he starts with a general definition of the Commonwealth, or republique, namely an ordered government of families under a sovereign. Size does not matter. Even three families can become a Commonwealth if they are united under one power and owe obedience to that power. The head of a family, the father and householder, is a kind of image of the sovereign, but he does not exercise properly political sovereignty over the members of the house. His wife and children are, as we would put it, his dependents, not his subjects. In the next few chapters, Bodin moves on to explore what it means to be a political subject, again in a rather Romist fashion, by distinguishing subjecthood from other kinds of subordinate relation. Notably, subjecthood should not be confused with slavery. Bodin thinks that in certain regimes, like the Ottoman Sultanate, all the people are slaves to the ruler, and all property, in principle, belongs to him. But this is not really a state or Commonwealth, it's just despotism. And the state of slavery is, in Bodin's view, unnatural. Its frequency in human history is simply a demonstration of the human propensity towards sin. Besides, enslaved people are bound to revolt against their oppressors, whereas what Bodin is looking for is a recipe for stable political life. There is a deeper point here though, which is that slaves occupy their role simply as the result of violence, or the threat of it. When the master tells the slave what to do, this is no more legitimate than, say, pointing a gun at someone and telling them to give you their money. Violence, or the threat of it, might produce cooperation, but it can never produce obligation. Far different are the commands issued by a sovereign. A rightful sovereign's commands ought to be obeyed by their subjects, not because of what he might do to them if they refuse, but just because they are his subjects. At first glance, Bodin seems to depict the authority of the sovereign as being absolutely unfettered and uncontestable. He defines sovereignty as, the absolute and perpetual power of a Commonwealth. Later on in the work, he says that the officers or magistrates must obey even commands they take to be unjust. Bodin does not even allow them to resign as an act of conscience, rather than carry out their orders. These are clearly not the king-making and king-breaking magistrates envisioned by the Huguenot political theorists, Hartmann and Beza. But Bodin's contrary view is not just a matter of devotion to the crown or of pragmatic calculation. He has a principled reason for thinking that the sovereign should be unchallenged, namely that he is the source of all law. In a sense, this is his only power, and indeed the only political power there is, because all other powers, the appointment of officials, levying of taxation, waging of war, and so on, stem from this authority to make laws. This helps to explain why Bodin rejected the idea of a separation of powers. It is the power to make law that is definitive of sovereignty, and this power cannot be vested in multiple potentially opposing sources. If it were, then they could issue contrary commands, or countermand each other's edicts. That would be the opposite of a state, it would be anarchy. In fact, the sovereign cannot even challenge himself, in that he cannot issue edicts binding his own future decisions. Laws and institutions must adapt to fit changing circumstances. Just as Roman law is not likely to be right for a 16th century Frenchman, the right laws for France in 1570 might be different from the right laws in 1571. Bodin does caution against rapid change in the laws, since this tends to undermine the legitimacy of the whole regime. In many cases, even an unjust law should be altered only gradually. But this is merely a pragmatic point. In principle, the sovereign may overturn and change laws as he sees fit, with no constraint, and with an exception we'll get to in a minute, no need for consent from the subjects. Because the unity and supremacy of sovereignty is emphasized so strongly by Bodin, and because it yields such a sharp contrast between him and some other authors of the time, it tends to be the main idea that is associated with him as a political thinker. But a closer look shows that he is far from an endorsing an anything-goes autocracy. For starters, he sees law in normative terms, meaning that lawmaking has a purpose, namely justice. By his theory, imperfect sovereigns must be obeyed. Indeed, this will be the usual situation, since Bodin admits that good rulers are rare. But the ideal on which the theory is modeled is a wise and just king dispensing laws that adapt and react to circumstances. This brings us to another important caveat to the idea that Bodin was an unrestrained absolutist. Though he did, as we've seen, define sovereignty in terms of absolute power, he did not mean by this phrase what we would naturally take it to mean. The sovereign's lawmaking power is absolute simply because it allows him to change existing laws, to release subjects from obligations imposed on them or to impose new ones. Again, nothing can entrench an existing law to put it beyond the sovereign's right to revise it, not even in the earlier decree of the same sovereign. It is conceptually impossible for the sovereign to bind his own power, just as it is conceptually impossible for anyone else to thwart that power. Since absolute power has this fairly narrow meaning, it is entirely compatible with something else Bodin says, which would otherwise seem to be in conflict with his theory, namely that the sovereign is supreme only in the realm of civic law. Like anyone else, he is subject to the natural and divine law. Suppose a sovereign behaves tyrannically, for instance by knowingly jailing or executing innocent people. He would not be overstepping his bounds as a political ruler, and his subjects would not be entitled to overthrow him. But that does not mean he'd be off the hook. He would be violating another set of commands, those handed down by natural reason and by God himself. Now, this might look like a rather weak caveat. Bodin seems to be saying that no one is empowered to stop a ruler from being tyrannical apart from God, who famously moves in mysterious ways, which include literally letting people get away with murder, at least in this life. So what sanction can be brought to bear on a tyrant? Apparently none. But remember, this is a political theory of obligations and rights, not a theory about actually getting people to do what they ought to. Think again of the contrast between the sovereign and the armed robber. As a purely practical matter, you can more easily ignore the sovereign's commands than those of the robber who is presently shoving a gun in your face, but that doesn't mean that the robber has any standing to tell you what to do. Similarly, the sovereign ruler is obligated to follow the natural law regardless whether he actually does so. In this respect, Bodin is actually putting greater restraints on his sovereign than some political thinkers would. Notably, Machiavelli held that according to the reason of state, a ruler might need to do all sorts of immoral things in order to be effective, and if so, then he should go right ahead. Bodin forcefully rejects this. His sovereign is the highest power in political terms, but subject to higher powers in matters of morality and religion. Any lingering suspicion that these constraints are empty ones should be banished by turning to Bodin's discussion of taxation. We would probably think of this as a paradigm case of a purely political issue well within the realm of civic law, where whatever the sovereign says goes. But Bodin sees the sanctity of private property as part of the natural law. This means that the sovereign has an obligation to respect the property of his subjects, and even that the consent of the subjects needs to be secured to impose taxes upon them, or to confiscate wealth in any other way. Bodin stood up for this principle at a meeting of the Estates General held in Blois in 1576, arguing that the king had no right to alienate property belonging to the nation by selling it off to raise money. This soured his relation with the sitting monarch, an ironic outcome for this famous proponent of absolute monarchy, but at least it allowed him to respond to criticisms that he was allowing unrestrained authority to the sovereign. When an edition of his six books appeared in Geneva, adding a list of complaints about his teachings, he was able to point to his stand at the Estates General as proof that his absolutism was not quite so absolute as it seemed. The natural law imposes another important constraint on the sovereign, which is that he must abide by any contracts he makes with his subjects. This is a tricky point since Bodin has been telling us repeatedly that everything is subject to the sovereign s will and that not even he can bind his future commands by making promises in the here and now. But again, there is no contradiction, we just need to bear in mind the difference between a law and a contract. A law is binding in only one direction, the sovereign commands, and the subject has the obligation to obey. A contract, by contrast, is binding in both directions. So legal agreements, made with a sovereign, are legally enforceable in the court system. This sounds like a somewhat technical point, but it is important for a couple of reasons. First, it underscores the substantive role of the natural law in Bodin's theory, since natural law is the source of the obligation to honor contracts. Second, it gets us to the heart of his disagreement with the Huguenot political theorists. Huttman and Beza saw the relationship between the ruler and subject as obligating on both sides. The subjects put the ruler in charge, with a view to achieving safety, peace, and so on, and obey him as their part of this deal. If the ruler fails to live up to his side of the bargain, they, or rather, the appropriate magistrates, can get rid of him. For Bodin, this is an amateurish mistake. These writers have confused laws with contracts. Lawmaking sovereign authority is a one-way street, and it involves no obligations on the sovereign's side. Bodin is not then a social contract theorist, though he does think that sovereignty can be established when a people consents to hand power to a single authority. He also thinks it can happen the good old-fashioned way, through force, as by a violent conquest. In particular, he thinks that the monarchy of France was established through force, not by consent. So that's another point of disagreement with Huguenot authors like Hodman. But there was at least one thing they did agree on, a topic we've been following over the last few episodes, religious tolerance. Bodin's own religious convictions are a matter of controversy. Never mind Protestantism and Catholicism, he was suspected of harboring sympathy for Judaism. But he was in favor of France's remaining Catholic. The main goal, in his view, was yet again stability. So avoiding factionalism was the main priority, so long as everyone was willing to sign up to monotheistic religion. A unified state religion commanding the allegiance of the whole people would be ideal, but if this was practically unattainable, pluralism would be preferable to open dissent and conflict. Thus, Bodin argues that the sovereign should allow freedom in private worship and avoid coercion in matters of religion. Indeed, the sovereign should seek to remain neutral above the fray of religious disputation. As one scholar has put it, by not demanding control over religious beliefs, the sovereign demonstrates a commitment to all simultaneously. Bodin even wrote a work that dramatizes the possibility of unity across religious divides, a so-called colloquium consisting of a dialogue between seven speakers of different faiths. Actually, one of them is not a religious figure, but a natural philosopher. Since they can all agree on the precepts of the natural law and on a kind of generic monotheism, they find that there is far more harmony than discord between them. While these ideas about religious tolerance are by now pretty familiar to us, Bodin's general theory of sovereignty is genuinely groundbreaking. Which is not to say that he was right, of course. There is a seductive appeal to his idea that sovereignty must in the end rest with a single authority. The buck has to stop somewhere. But as the political structure of the United States and many other countries shows, the power to make and remake laws is not the only power wielded by states. You can separate the function of making laws from the function of enforcing them, for example. Also, in a representative democracy, it is possible for the people to be both sovereign and subject, which Bodin thought to be absurd. Still, by raising this issue in such stark terms, Bodin laid the seeds for the development of just such ideas. Another important achievement was that, for the first time, he defined citizenship in terms of being subject to a certain political authority. We would now find this natural, but before Bodin, going all the way back to Aristotle, citizens had been understood to be those who are actively participating in political life. This meant that disenfranchised people, like slaves, women, and children, were by definition not citizens. Whereas on Bodin's account, anyone living under a regime and owing it allegiance could be considered a citizen. It was actually Bodin's absolutist approach to sovereignty that allowed him to make this breakthrough. For him, all authority lies ultimately with the sovereign, which means that everyone else is on a par in being a subject, whether they are noble or common, free or a slave, male or female, adult or child. While the full implications of Bodin's ideas would not be clear for quite some time, he did have a great impact on his contemporaries and immediate successors. His ideas about the unity of sovereignty were widely accepted, and by a diverse range of thinkers, like the Ramus political theorist Johannes Althusius and the encyclopedist Rotellumaeus Keckerman. A witness said in the 1580s that at Cambridge University, students would often be found in their rooms, poring over the pages of Bodin's six books on the republic. All of which is even more impressive when you consider that political theory was only one of Bodin's many interests. He was a classic example of the humanist polymath, who, as we've seen, wrote on law and history, and also on natural philosophy and economics. His ideas on the latter topic were formulated in response to Jehan Malestroy, who had pointed to a couple of apparent paradoxes concerning the phenomenon of inflation. This was a phenomenon that became increasingly evident across the 16th century, as prices went up fourfold in Spain and tripled in France. But Malestroy argued that in a sense, people were paying the same, even as goods seemed to cost more. If you looked at the actual amount of raw gold and silver being handed over for a given commodity, this always remained the same. Prices were increasing, but only because of the debasement of coins by the state, which meant that the coins were worth less all the time. A cow that cost one silver coin in 1500 might cost two silver coins in 1550, but that's just because the 1550 coin had half as much precious metal in it. So actually, argued Malestroy, prices were remaining constant. This preserved the intuitive idea that the cow is really worth a certain weight of silver and retains that same value over time. Bodin denied this intuition. He agreed that debasement of coinage is a cause of inflation, and in fact the only cause that a government can actually control, but it is not the only or even the chief cause of rising prices. He observed that monopolies drive up prices, as do scarcity of goods and runaway spending on luxuries by the rich, in other words, changes in supply and demand. But for him, the most important factor was the amount of gold and silver in supply. The more precious metal is in circulation, the less it is worth, because it too is subject to the law of supply and demand. More supply means lower value, whether we're talking about the supply of cows or gold. Remarkably, Bodin made this observation without yet having appreciated the impact of the influx of gold and silver from Spain's conquests in the Americas. In later writings, though, he did mention this as a driver of inflation. The implication of Bodin's argument is that, unlike sovereignty, economic worth is never absolute. Neither money nor the things you can buy with it have a stable, unchanging value. Rather, everything is subject to market forces. Bodin's independence of mind is shown yet again in a massive treatise he wrote on natural philosophy called The Theatre of All Nature, published in 1596, a full 30 years after his first major work, the aforementioned Method of History. As has been shown in a detailed study by Anne Blair, Bodin approached both projects in the same way. He followed the advice of Erasmus by keeping commonplace books of citations and passages that struck him as he pursued a lifetime of voracious reading. This material would then be wrestled into shape for the purposes of his own writings. Or at least, more or less into shape. A recent biographer of Bodin has remarked that he was congenitally argumentative, able to leave few avenues unexplored, few authorities unchallenged, few examples unpresented from his vast store of learning. For our purposes, it's the challenging of authorities that is of particular interest. In The Theatre of Nature, Bodin follows the lead of Ramesh by constantly questioning the views of Aristotle. He disagrees with him on topics great and small, denying for instance that subjects should be analyzed in terms of matter and form, and that all birds have two feet. He's particularly concerned in his discussions of nature to emphasize the wise providence of God. For example, he complains that Aristotle failed to give a single unified account of saltiness in different natural fluids from seawater to the sweat of animals. As a Christian, Bodin is able to produce triumphantly the true explanation, God put salt in everything to preserve it. Bodin liked to appeal to experience to support his own theories, though as Anne Blair says, what he meant by this was an undifferentiated medieval mix of hearsay, bookish learning, and actual experience. He was no empiricist, and in fact was again critical of Aristotle for basing all science on sense perception. Some phenomena are supernatural in character, and we need to know about them, whether we are talking about divine providence or the malevolent influence of demons. Yes, demons. Bodin wrote a whole work about them, which appeared in 1580. It talks about how witches call on demons to work their magic, provides accounts of witch trials conducted in France during his lifetime, and encourages the use of torture against suspected witches, even recommending specific torments as particularly agonizing and hence particularly effective. It may seem disconcerting, even incredible, that the author of a sophisticated and enduringly important work, like the six books on the republic, would go in for such cruel and superstitious nonsense. But, as we'll see in a later episode, belief in witchcraft was widespread in this era and integrated with philosophical and scientific theories in surprising ways. Besides, in one respect, the Bodin of the demonology is evidently the same man as the Bodin of the six books. He feared that witches would undermine the order and cohesion of the community, the very results that a well-running state should be aiming to establish. Like someone offering debased coins in exchange for a cow, I've sold Bodin a bit short in this episode by touching only lightly on his non-political writings. In particular, it would be worth milking his treatise on natural philosophy a bit more. So next time, I'll be speaking to the aforementioned Anne Blair, a leading expert on that work and natural philosophy in this whole period. So join me for, and you already know which joke is coming here, an utterly fascinating conversation with her next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.