SOVEREIGNTY, THEORY OF

SOVEREIGNTY, THEORY OF. The modern concept of sovereignty owes more to the jurist Jean Bodin (1530–1596) than it does to any other early modern theorist. Bodin conceived it as a supreme, perpetual, and indivisible power, marked by the ability to make law without the consent of any other. Its possession by a single ruler, a group, or the entire body of citizens defined a commonwealth as monarchy, aristocracy, or popular state. Without it a commonwealth was not properly a state at all. In his Six livres de la république (1576; Six books of the commonwealth) Bodin came to favor absolute monarchy, but the legacy of medieval juristic ideas and the political conflicts of his time led him into some contradictions and changes of front.

In the sixth chapter of his Methodus ad Facilem Historiarum Cognitionem (1566; Method for the easy comprehension of histories) Bodin first discussed the nature of sovereignty, which he called in Latin suverenitas. Using a comparative historical method, he classified past and present states and empires and reviewed the opinions of Roman law jurists on the meaning of such terms as summum imperium (the highest authority) and merum imperium (unqualified authority). He insisted that the mixed state was an impossibility, but at this stage he did not stress the legislative function. It was listed as only the second of five functions of sovereignty, the others being creating magistrates, declaring war and peace, hearing judicial appeals in the last resort, and deciding on life or death where the latter was the prescribed penalty. In The Commonwealth making and unmaking law became the sole function, engrossing all the rest. Here Bodin was influenced by Roman law traditions that saw legislative power as command or will, as expressed in the maxim "what pleases the prince has the force of law" (quod principi placet legis vigorem habet). His term for sovereignty became souveraineté in French and majestas in Latin.

The main reason for Bodin's change of heart was probably the desire to outflank theories of legitimate resistance to the French crown advanced by Protestant writers in the contemporary civil wars. However, he did suggest certain limitations on the power of what he termed "royal monarchy," as distinct from lordly and despotic types of rulership where power knew few or no boundaries. In a royal monarchy, such as France, England, Scotland, and Spain, the sovereign was bound to observe divine and natural law; he could not tax his subjects without their consent; he should keep contracts with his subjects; and he was unable to alter certain fundamental laws, such as the laws of succession to the throne. Despite these limitations, the power of a royal sovereign was termed "absolute," and this is not surprising, since Bodin undermined most of these constitutional reservations. The sovereign was the sole judge of divine and natural law; he could tax without consent in emergencies; and he could decide that contracts were no longer operative when, in his view, a subject had ceased to benefit from them. An additional novelty was introduced in The Commonwealth. While continuing to insist on the indivisibility of sovereignty and the impossibility of the mixed state, Bodin made a distinction between the form of the state and the method of its administration. A sovereign might choose to administer his realm using officials of aristocratic or popular origin, thus giving the false impression of mixture.

BODIN'S INTERPRETERS

In the seventeenth century Bodin's idea of absolute sovereignty became influential throughout most of Europe. In France it was absorbed into the prevailing doctrine that kings were appointed by God and responsible to him alone, but its juristic elements remained important and were even strengthened in some respects. The jurists Charles Loyseau (1564–1627) and Cardin Le Bret (1558–1655), for example, eliminated Bodin's view that the sovereign should normally obtain consent to taxation in their respective treatises Traité des seigneuries (1608; On lordships) and De la souverainetéduRoi (1632; On royal sovereignty). Le Bret invented the celebrated phrase that sovereignty was as indivisible as a point in geometry.

Bodin, whose Commonwealth was translated into English in 1606, was often cited in political discourse in England during the early part of the reign of Charles I (1625–1648), but it was not until war broke out between the king and the Long Parliament in 1642 that his concept of sovereignty seemed relevant to English conditions. The militant pamphleteer who later made his peace with the Stuarts, William Prynne (1600–1669), adapted Bodin to claim sovereignty for Parliament without the king in The Soveraigne Power of Parliaments and Kingdomes (1643). He also enlisted French sixteenth-century resistance theorists in the parliamentary cause, associating the underlying authority of the people with sovereign power in a way that would have been anathema to Bodin. Opposing polemicists referred at times to Bodin in support of Stuart absolutism, but the general policy of Charles I's advisers was to assert that it was Parliament that had broken the mixed English constitution by asserting a superior authority.

In Germany Johannes Althusius (1577–1638), professor of law at Herborn (Nassau) and syndic of Emden, had close ties to the resistance to Spanish rule in the Netherlands and sympathized with French resistance literature. Like Prynne forty years later, he linked these ideas with the Bodinian definition of sovereignty, but in a much more logical fashion. His Politica Methodice Digesta (1603; Politics systematically analyzed) concluded that in every state Bodinian sovereignty reposed inalienably in the community as a whole, and that rulers and magistrates were mere delegates of the people. This, he asserted, was what Bodin had implied when he held that fundamental constitutional laws belonged to the sovereignty and not to individuals who ruled in name.

Other German jurists resented Bodin's classification of the Holy Roman Empire as an aristocracy and of the emperor as no more powerful than the doge of Venice. Some ingeniously exploited Bodin's qualifications to his theory to make it fit the complexities of the German constitution. Henning Arnisaeus (1576/1579–1636), a physician who acted as political adviser to the king of Denmark, criticized Althusius and defended monarchical sovereignty in a manner closer to Bodin's intentions. His best-known theoretical work, De Jure Majestatis (1610; On the right of sovereignty), not only defended Bodin's denial of the mixed state, but refused to admit its equivalent through Bodin's distinction between form of state and method of government. However, the complications in imperial institutions led Arnisaeus to suggest that the attributes of sovereignty could be distributed among several authorities.

Another German theorist, the Hebrew scholar BartholomäusKeckermannofGdańsk (1571–1608), used the distinction between form and method to argue in his Systema Disciplinae Politicae (1606; System of political science) that the empire was monarchic in form but aristocratic in governance. Perhaps the most discerning German commentator on Bodin's theory of sovereignty was Christoph Besold (1577–1638), who taught jurisprudence at Tübingen and Ingolstadt. He adopted the theory of double sovereignty, in which personal sovereignty (majestas personalis) resided in the ruler or in a corporate entity of unequal parts (such as the emperor and the diet), while real sovereignty (majestas realis) lay permanently in the community as a whole. The latter, however, could only be exercised as a constituent power when government collapsed and a new constitution was needed. These views were expressed in Politicorum Libri Duo(1618; Two books on politics). Besold also remarked that, if personal sovereignty was shared among several persons in an aristocracy, it was pointless to deny the possibility of the mixed form.

GROTIUS AND PUFENDORF

The idea of constituent power was also implied by the influential Dutch statesman and jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645). Although he had some constitutional reservations, Grotius strongly admired Bodin's view of monarchical sovereignty. His best-known work was De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625; On the law of war and peace), in which he preferred the Roman law term summum imperium to majestas. He suggested two possessors of sovereignty, the proper owner (subjectum proprium) and the communal owner (subjectum commune), but denied that the latter could be invoked to support resistance. It resembled a theory propounded by Arnisaeus, who held that the whole community or civitas existed as a latent corporation to protect property rights.

In 1672 Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694), a Saxon jurist at Heidelberg who entered the service of the king of Sweden, published his De Jure Naturae et Gentium (Of the law of nature and nations), a book comparable with Grotius's War and Peace. A student of the German constitution, he was more critical of Bodin than was Grotius, and he generally found German institutions too complex to fit the straitjacket of any political theory. Nevertheless, he described sovereignty in terms of a legal fiction as "a composite moral person (persona moralis composita) whose will . . . is deemed the will of all; to the end that it may use and apply the strength and riches of private persons towards maintaining the common peace and security."

HOBBES, BOSSUET, AND ROUSSEAU

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), perhaps the most logical of all the theorists of sovereignty, achieved a level of abstraction in his masterpiece, Leviathan (1651), which ignored historical facts and previous thinkers with equal disdain. Superficially, Hobbes's concept of sovereignty appears similar to Bodin's in terms of absolute power, indivisibility, and the voluntarist view of law, but its premises are entirely different. Human beings were not, in terms of Aristotelian organicist imagery, by nature social and political animals: they were egotistical beings whose mutual hostility had created a savage state of nature from which they were obliged to escape by agreeing with each other to surrender all their rights to a sovereign for the sake of security. Thenceforth the sovereign represented all citizens separately, and in a sense they became the authors of all his acts. They could not, it is true, renounce the right of self-defense, but all the corporate resistance and contract theories of the past were refuted by this new and ruthless doctrine of absolute sovereignty.

The personal rule of Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715; took personal charge of the government of France from 1661) seemed to contemporaries to incarnate absolute monarchical sovereignty. Indeed the king himself, preparing his memoirs in 1666, said that kings were absolute sovereigns controlling all the property of their subjects, whether clerical or lay, for the needs of the state. Elements of the juristic tradition of sovereignty lay behind this attitude, but the ideology that dominated the reign was that of the divine right of kings. Its principal spokesman was Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), bishop of Meaux. His Politique tirée des propres paroles de l'écriture sainte (composed 1670, published 1709; Politics drawn from the very words of Holy Scripture) expounded this doctrine, but also stressed that the king owed a duty to his subjects and pointed out that his power was absolute but not arbitrary.

In the eighteenth century the concept of absolute sovereignty began to be replaced by a theory of checks and balances defined by Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689–1755). However, a new kind of sovereignty was devised by the proto-Romantic writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) in Du contrat social (1762; The social contract). Rousseau had read Hobbes closely and, like him, based his doctrine on multiple agreements between primitive people to escape the state of nature. At the same time Rousseau detested both Hobbes's premises and his conclusions. Instead of postulating a presocial people involved in a brutal war for survival, Rousseau believed moral sentiment and a desire for the common good had moved humankind to renounce the state of nature. Instead of agreements to surrender individual rights to an absolute ruler, Rousseau proposed primeval agreements to merge all particular rights in a democratic corporate community whose general will (la volontégénérale) was the sovereign. Since the general will was always devoted to the common good, its decisions must always be morally right: "Now, as the sovereign is formed entirely of the individuals who compose it, it has not, nor could it have, any interest contrary to theirs. . . . The sovereign by the mere fact that it is, is always all that it ought to be."

Rousseau's formula bore the shades of earlier theorists of sovereignty. It reflected Bodin's indivisibility and legislative power, Althusius's communal sovereignty, and even Pufendorf's "composite moral person whose will is deemed the will of all" (see above). The problem was that Rousseau had no clear idea of how the general will could be determined. He did not believe in representation, and he regarded majority decisions with suspicion. His theory seemed to make sense only in the context of an ancient Greek city-state society, where the free citizen could realize his full potential. This was not the way his ideas were applied in the French Revolution, where Jacobin demagogues declaimed that they alone were the bearers of the nation's general will.

See also Absolutism ; Aristocracy and Gentry ; Authority, Concept of ; Autocracy ; Bodin, Jean ; Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne ; Democracy ; Divine Right Kingship ; Grotius, Hugo ; Hobbes, Thomas ; Law ; Louis XIV (France) ; Monarchy ; Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat de ; National Identity ; Natural Law ; Political Philosophy ; Republicanism ; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques ; Tyranny, Theory of .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Althusius, Johannes. Politics. Translated and abridged by Frederick S. Carney. Boston, 1964.

Bodin, Jean. Method for the Easy Comprehension of History. Translated by Beatrice Reynolds. New York, 1945.

——. On Sovereignty: Four Chapters from The Six Books of the Commonwealth. Edited and translated by Julian H. Franklin. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1992.

Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne. Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture. Translated and edited by Patrick Riley. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1990.

Grotius, Hugo. The Rights of War and Peace. Edited by Jean Barbeyrac. London, 1738.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan: Or, the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil. Edited by Michael Oakeshott. Oxford, 1946.

Pufendorf, Samuel. Of the Law of Nature and Nations: Eight Books. Translated by Basil Kennet. London, 1717.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract. Edited and translated by Maurice Cranston. Baltimore, 1968.

Secondary Sources

Dufour, Alfred, "Pufendorf." In The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700. Edited by J. H. Burns. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1991.

Franklin, Julian H. Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory. Cambridge, U.K., 1973.

Jouvenel, Bertrand de. Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good. Translated by J. F. Huntington. Chicago, 1957.

Salmon, J. H. M. "The Legacy of Jean Bodin: Absolutism, Populism, or Constitutionalism?" History of Political Thought 17, no. 4 (1996): 500–522.

Tuck, Richard. Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1993. See Chapter 5 on Grotius (pages 154–201) and chapter 7 on Hobbes (pages 279–345).

J. H. M. Salmon